It may seem like a foregone conclusion to making sure your blog has social media friendly elements baked into it to enable your readers to easily share your content, and become a regular follower of your contributions to the digital world.  But I’m amazed at how many blogs I actually come across that make it much more difficult then it needs to be.  By just taking a few easy tips to re-organize your blog and add some plugins or code, you can have your blog set up so that anyone that stops by can quickly and easily share your content, and find you in the social media world.

1. Make Your Social Media Inventory Front & Center – For $100 I hired someone off of Craigslist to whip up a custom module that you see on the top right that contains my Social Media stats and inventory.  While your subscriber count or twitter following is not the be all end all, if you have a decent following you should let your audience know.  It’s instant credibility, and it might help you convince people to stick around.  Of course you need to back it up with some good content.  You don’t have to pay anyone to do this either as there are some adequate plugins and code to accomplish this as well (see here and here).  I just chose to have someone make it look a little more custom.

2. Share Buttons On Top & Bottom – I make it extremely easy for any reader to share no matter where they may be on the post.  On the bottom I use the fantastic Sexy Bookmarks plugin which I’ve loved since day one.  It provides just about every social network out there and you can customize it to your heart’s content.  At the top I just use the official Twitter and Facebook buttons to avoid to much clutter.  The reality is those are the channels that are most important.

3. Upgrade Your Comments – Users love the ability to just use their existing social media profiles to log in, and it’s no different with commenting.  Make sure you upgrade your blog commenting system to something a little more SM friendly like Disqus.  Some of the great features include using existing profiles to log in, comment tracking, and the ability to share your discussion across social media channels.

What steps have you taken to make your blog social media friendly?

When I decided to do a book giveaway, my intentions were certainly noble.  I genuinely wanted to give them away.  However I also wanted to measure how a contest would impact the traffic to my site from a visitor and engagement standpoint.  Best of both worlds.

First off, thank you to everyone that left a comment on the site.  I always appreciate when people take the time to leave read anything I write, especially when they take the time to leave a few words.

I knew running a contest would give my blog a traffic and engagement boost, but I was definitely curious to see how much exactly.  Here’s the raw data:

• -31 Comments (6 times the norm)
• -30 Tweets (30-40% higher then average)
• -8.1/10 PostRank (50% higher then average)
• -187 page views (about the norm)

So my takeaway is that obviously my reader engagement increased quite a bit.  There was an incentive to do so, but page views weren’t really effected.  I would say that what the contest did for me was encourage existing readers of my blog to engage, not so much attract new readers.  Let’s be honest, it was only a few books so it wasn’t the sexiest giveaway.  Hopefully I can come up with something bigger in the near future.

At the end of the day, doing a contest on your blog will definitely give you a boost in your reader engagement, but the real hope is that by working in a contest or two, you can start to earn additional trust and regular visitors to your site, but it takes more then that.  You have to engage back, and find the time to reciprocate on those readers that visit that blog as well.

And without further ado, the winner of the Social Media Book Giveaway is Sue Koch!  Congratulations to Sue and thanks to everyone for participating!