How to get your readers to click through on social media (without pissing them off)

For as long as I can remember, my Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn feeds have been stuffed full of posts convincing you to click through with their manipulative titles and enticing images. This, my friends, is known as click bait. Click bait is a nasty, deceptive and quite often tacky way of getting social media followers to your website. Having a scroll through my own Facebook feed, the following shameful click baits appeared:

Other than exposing my shocking taste in trashy news pages, these examples are proof that click bait is very much embedded in our social media platforms, and frankly, a little difficult to avoid. Indeed, the very fact that you clicked through to this blog post is evidence that a catchy title (with a cheeky swear word chucked in) is enough to wet your appetite and want to read more – even if the content doesn’t involve Chris Hemsworth’s package…

So how do you avoid irritating your leads when you are sharing your business blog on social media?

Well, in his blog post How to Write Link Bait that Isn’t Click Bait, Anthony Chatfield argues that the social media link should just be the cherry on top of cracking content. This is especially important now that Facebook has further updated it’s algorithm to filter out exciting links that lead to disappointing content, meaning you have to provide better quality link bait to your business blog to even be noticed by Facebook.

To get you started, here are five examples of good quality link bait from Anthony:

1. List Articles – I know what you’re thinking. Does the world really need MORE of these? The simple answer is no, but a good list topic can be a useful hook to go with an otherwise more substantial blog post. Lists of 20 items with two sentences each are boring and easy to replicate. A good, long list with detail on important topics will get you where you want to be. Buzzfeed has refined this format to a sharp point, but others are coming up with new takes constantly.

1. Detailed Walkthroughs – Go deeper than the typical list article by creating detailed walkthroughs of new products, services, or technologies in your niche.

1. Interviews with Experts – Interview an expert in your field. They are much easier to find and get on camera or microphone than you might think. Even if you just record a 30 minute Skype call and transcribe it, that content will be gold.

1. Video Content – Video remains the strongest performing type of content on the Internet. It doesn’t have the SEO legs of a well written blog post (yet) but it is far more likely to be shared and liked on a wide scale if you have something new and unique to share with the world.

1. New Strategies for Old Problems – One of the biggest pushback I hear about lists and walkthroughs is that there are already hundreds if not thousands of articles on the same topics. Think of something wholly unique to use in those articles, though, and you can take off in your niche and become an instant authority because of it.

To read Anthony Chatfield’s full article How to Write Link Bait that Isn’t Click Bait, click here.

To make sure you are not stumbling up on anything else in social media, have a read of our free eBook SEO goes from Search to Social: