Get more shares: 3 essential Facebook tactics

Your social media content is DOA if it doesn’t get shared.

Shares drive virality. Shares boost SEO. Shares signify engagement.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on Facebook, where shares recently supplanted “likes” as the metric of choice.

So, how do you create more shareable posts and campaigns? Here are three tips for tapping into social media’s hottest metric on its widest-reaching network:

1. Gear your content strategy toward mobile accessibility. More than 70 percent of Facebook traffic comes through mobile devices, which means you must optimize content for mobile in every possible way. Ideally, anything you’re linking to should be easy to read or view on a mobile device.

“Make sure to size and crop photos to fit Facebook’s mobile dimensions,” says Laura Nathan-Garner, program director of integrated media communications at Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center. Images sized to 560 X 292 pixels are optimal for full display in the mobile news feed.

“Headlines and teasers should also be shortened when sharing link previews to ensure readers will get the full message,” she says. Copy within posts must be concise, she adds, and the first paragraph or teaser should entice readers to click through to longer-form text.