What is Social Sharing?
At the end or even the beginning of an article or another shareable piece of content on a website, you may have noticed a few icons. The usual suspects are there: Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. But depending on the website, you may also notice an email icon or one with a link.
All the social giants offer sharing buttons for website owners to easily embed on their sites to get viewers to share the content with their own social circles. Essentially, social sharing enables anyone with a message and a website to outsource some of the marketing to their audience. Whether your organization is a non-profit, a parks and rec agency, a campus recreation department or any other type of community organization, you probably have news, articles, programs, events and more that’s worth sharing. Social sharing is the easiest way to turn your website visitors into your own personal marketers and enable "word of mouse”—otherwise known as word of mouth.
Why Should I Use It?
Social sharing gets the word out about your organization’s events, programs and classes—or anything else worth putting out into the world, like an announcement or a policy change. Enabling your members and participants to share this information not only benefits them, but it benefits your organization and community as well. Don't forget to utilize social media best practices on all your social channels.
Social Sharing Drives Excitement and Engagement
Get your members and participants excited to share information about classes or events. Incentivize them by rewarding and encourage sharing with referrals, rebates and promotions.
Reach a New Audience With Social Sharing
Once your blog, event or program information has been shared by one of your participants or members, the reach of that event or program grows to their followers, friends and family. If that post has engagement (comments, likes), the audience grows even more. The more engagement, the bigger the audience, and the bigger the audience, the bigger the possibility of a registration or conversion.
Social Sharing Generates Registrations and Grows Revenue
As mentioned, social sharing opens up your event or program to a larger audience, which in turn precipitates the possibility of more registrations and revenue. Who doesn’t love that? More and more people are getting information about events and classes online and via their social media channels. The best recommendations come from friends and family, so why not leverage that to your benefit?
How Can I Utilize Social Sharing?
- On your blog - If you write articles, allow your readers to share them through social sharing buttons.
- On your news page - If you offer news from around your community, allow readers to share the news with sharing buttons.
- On your registration pages - If you offer classes, events, programs and camps, let interested visitors share those pages with their social networks.
- After someone registers - If someone registers for a program or event, allow them to share it on Facebook, Twitter and other networks.
As you know, people trust their friends more than they trust marketing messages. By having social sharing buttons on your website, you'll be able to use that to your advantage. Each time a web page is shared, it will drive traffic back to your site, depending on the size of the sharer's network.
How Can I Get Started?
Each social network has its own sharing buttons that you can grab the code for and customize for each button. However, there are also websites that consolidate buttons into packages so you can get started more easily. Here are some places you can get social sharing buttons for your website:
If you’re looking for the easiest way to get started, use Share This of Add This. If you are looking for more customization, visit each social network and build your own buttons. Once on your site, you'll see a bump in traffic. Go ahead and get started on letting your readers become your marketers!
ACTIVEWorks Endurance, ACTIVENet and ACTIVEWorks Camp & Class manager all offer social media sharing tools and make it easy for participants to utilize various channels to increase content sharing to their friends and family. Increase registrations to your events, camps and classes with ACTIVE.
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