Social media mobile usage is on the boost these days. Is your site ready? 
The use of mobile platforms for social media access is huge. More than 500 million people in 2014 used their phones to access Facebook exclusively (source). Twitter users spend 86% of their time on the network through their smartphones (source). Four out of 10 all-time most popular mobile apps are social media (Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and Twitter).
Most people using a smart phone right now do it to access their social media feeds…
The key takeaway here: LOTS of mobile phone users are on social media daily. They would love to see and click your links there, they would love to share your articles with their friends.
But most people cannot do that:
Your site won't let them.
The Need to Enhance For Mobile Surfing
Investing time and effort into ensuring that everything you publish is enhanced for mobile surfing is going to be your most direct approach to solving this massive issue. The smoother you make the process of social sharing for the user, the more likely your site visitors are to be enticed by those CTAs you are putting at the end of posts, or to retweet/share those posts you are publishing on your profiles.
Recommended: How to Find Your Best Tweets and Buffer Them
It is about improving the mobile experience, making the user feel a sense of loyalty to you. Loyalty means more authority for your brand and your content, and authority makes you the go-to resource for whatever you are offering. Mobile-only users will have no choice but to spread you through their social apps.
When looking at workarounds, they can come off as pretty generic. But until more integrated technology is available that take into account the unique challenges of mobile social marketing, these are still more the most stable means of improving the numbers.
Test Your Own Sharing Button on Mobile
The first thing to do is to actually try sharing your site URLs to social media: An obvious step an incredible number of website owners miss.
Here are some of the inconveniences you may find:
(Mind that those inconveniences prevent your URL from being shared on social media: This is a forever lost one-time opportunity to be seen!)
1. Your social media message is anti-social: Your reader won't probably share:
2. Your share button brings you to a Safari page instead of opening an app
Remember the stats in the opening of the article? Most people access their social media accounts using apps: They won't even remember their passwords to login and share from the web browser!
3. It is simply impossible to share:
4. The buttons are too small to be clicked:
(Better keep fewer buttons: Not many people have tiny fingers!)
How you fix those issues depends on your resources: You can experiment with different social media share button platforms or you can tweak your own CCS if you have a good designer on staff.
The main thing is, these issues are not to be ignored: It's how your content spreads on the fastest growing medium!
Make Your Site Mobile App Friendly
Once they click through to your site, you have to make sure the mobile version of your site looks good. This should be obvious, right? Yet, how often do you click on a link you are interested in, have it open in the app itself, and then get bogged down with slow loads, bad layouts, and endless comments?
A shocking number of even huge sites have not optimized for mobile surfing, and they have lost a lot because of it. Not only will people never share that content, they probably won't even read it. And in the future, when they come across more links from that site, they are going to completely ignore it.
Here are some tools to help:
- Measure your page load time and clearly see which elements slow it down. This tool is the easiest free way to do that.
- Get rid of spam comments: Not only do they hurt your site image, they also slow down your pages!
- Select a good hosting provider to ensure fast load time. Sitegeek is my go-to site when it comes to comparing hosting companies and accessing reader reviews.
- Test your site mobile friendliness using Google's tool: It's one the most reliable free ways to do that.
- Monitor your site performance using a separate dashboard in Cyfe: In my case, I have Zendesk and Pingdom enabled there and that's the first tab I open in the morning.
Simplification As A Virtue
Twitter has kind of forced us to look at status updates in a different way. With such a limited amount of space, you really have to make every character count. Simplification is necessary. Those lessons should be carried on to any other networks you are using.
Mobile screens are small, and they are made for quick skimming and knee jerk reactions. People don't want complex, long, difficult to see statuses on any social network.
It's a good idea to use mobile-friendly “Tweet a quote” calls-to-action to generate more tweets from mobile users.
Create A Mobile App With Social Functionality
Mobile apps are a great way to improve your reach by having an isolated program that caters entirely to your customer base. Even popular blogs have gotten in on this action, and they are used more that mobile versions of the site that might not have the same intuitive design.
If you create an app, you can make it socially functional by encouraging sharing at any opportunity. For example, if you are an app storefront, let people share what they have bought, or socially share wishlists. Make it easy to review using social logins, so it will post that review on their page (if they allow).
Goodreads is a fantastic app that uses this kind of idea. Both their mobile app and desktop connects socially and posts their book reviews, what they are reading, and what they want to read.
If you are limited in development resources, use BuildFire to easily create a dedicated app for your website. It's very affordable too! Mine took me probably a few hours to put together:
Have a tactic that has worked for you in the past to improve your social marketing on mobile platforms? Let us know in the comments!
Wow great information on this site. Learning all sorts of new things. I like that everything is explained in normal English and not in a complicated way like other sites do. Thanks again.
Hello, first of all this is a very informative article I must say. We can not ignore the influence of Social Media sites on our blogs. One who is not giving importance to social media sharing and not optimizing, that person is wasting his/her time behind a blog.
Thanks for the comment! Glad you liked the article!
Hi Ann!
I agree with you that we must test our social sharing buttons and everything on our website – on a Mobile Device!
You are very right, the statistics are only showing a tremendous growth in the Mobile Industry. More and more people are accessing the internet, most of the time, via their smart phones. And it is because a smart phone is very convenient and a lot more accessible than a Laptop or Desktop. 😉
People usually carry their smart phones with them (at all times), right?
Making sure your website is very mobile friendly and that your social sharing buttons work properly – is very crucial to the success of your site!
Thank you very much for sharing your tips here. These are very useful!
Keep up the great work!
Cheers! 😀
Exactly, Freddy.. It’s astounding how many website owners never actually tried using their site from a mobile device! Most sites are completely unusable on mobile!
Hi! Ann,
I am a regular reader of this blog from a long time and learned many blogging skills from this blog (Thanks for Ileane Maam). You have covered a really important topic in your guest post.
I agree with you completely.
Today it’s not the right decision to invest on Television ads and things like that (It’s not 2003 anymore). Nowadays people spend most of the time on social media and thats why investing there can help you generate more leads.
If you are missing social sharing buttons on mobile than you are really losing several hundreds of leads and If you really want to convert them, Everyone should follow your advice.
Thanks again, Sharing this post on Twitter with my followers. 🙂
Cheers,
Umair
Thanks for the comment! I am glad to hear the article looks useful, Umair!
Hello Ann,
Nice information about mobile social share and tips on how we can carry it on our blog.
Optimizing our site for mobile sharing is very important and should be in our VIP list, if we want to drive in more traffic.
There are some social sharing plugins that offer you share button specifically for mobile users and renders another for PC users… plugin like that can increase your share chances.
Thanks for dropping a nice article such as this. Do have a beautiful week ahead…
Thanks! Which social sharing plugins would you personally recommend?
Hello Once again,
Currently, I am using Social Share & Locker Pro. It comes with awesome features. If you need it, its in the WordPress Plugin section or i can send you the plugin 😉
Also Sumome do offer same features…
They are freemium WordPress plugin, you should try them out.
Thank you
Thanks for this helpful post but there is lots of wordpress plugins which are automatically optimize the site for mobile social media sharing, thanks.
Hi Ann,
The handwriting is already on the wall – go social or die!
Your tips are apt and I sincerely believe that adopting them will prove super useful in the long run.
Personally, my sites are properly optimized for social media sharing – so I have no reason to have any challenges or worry.
This entry, I’m certain, will surely save a site from certain social media death!
Do enjoy the day!
Always,
Akaahan Terungwa
Thanks for the comment, Akaahan! Well-said!
Ann, really you write something special because people alway focus on web version social media sharing but not mobile version. From my hands on experience i also found the same, most of my visitor are reading from mobile.
Very informative post. Personally I uses Sumome for personalize social media sharing for mobile version of my blog. I love its feature and it is very easy to setup.
While social media traffic won’t be generating much revenue(as per my experience) it certainly helps ranking up the search results. And since maximum social media traffic comes from mobile devices websites should be certainly optimised for sharing.
Hello Ann! Thanks for the this article. I think social media has become the largest source of traffic for websites and most of the people use social networking sites on their mobile phones. So this is really necessary to well optimize those links as perfectly explained by you. Keep up the good work! 🙂
Great insights Ann,
There is no doubt that mobile is gradually taken over the internet which is why every marketer should always put it first.
Creating a mobile version of your site is really what no serious marketer should even think twice before implementing because its worth every efforts.
I’ve not really thought of creating a mobile app for my site but i think i should look into that. Will check out the tool your suggested for that.
Thanks for sharing.
Hi Ann,
#2 really is something to worry over; I have lost count on number of websites I had visited, read the content and wanted to share. Click on the share button only to open in my default browser, oh! Password again?
Who remember that? What next? I just move on and do something else…..that’s it.
I had learned over the years that one of the best way to get people interested in sharing your content is by not offering too many choices to share.
Choose two or three at most social sharing buttons, hopefully these should be where your most target audience hang around the most and ask your readers to share in those places.
giving too many choices to choose from may result into not making any at all.
Thanks Ann, nice read.
Great information shared. Social media is highly recommended for promoting online business.
Go Social !
Thanks
Thanks for Informative post. We can’t ignore social media sharing on mobile devices. If we have responsive sharing button then they will automatically optimize for our mobile site. So try to use that Social Sharing Plugin, which has responsive design layout.
Optimizing mobile interface is really necessary. If you notice in Google Webmaster tool, it is announced that this optimization will directly influence search ranks
I’m currently using SumoMe plugin, which works fine with my mobile site. Sharing is also good.
Social media sharing gives power to pages but it happens only for famous blogs, so adding new features might help to increase sharing. Thank You.