Although there are mixed feelings about social media and marketing with regards to revenue, social is here to stay for now. There are however many different things that people forget to do.
Lately I have been running into 3 major issues when I want to share something from my account or one of my client's accounts. Not only are these things easy to fix, but you should think about them and avoid them before you go live so that you can get the most out of social media with your sites.
1. Test your site on different tools like Hootsuite. I use Hootsuite on a regular basis with clients. What annoys me most is when I find a great site or blog to line up to share on Facebook and Twitter and when I shrink the URL it cannot pull a picture, title or description off the page. Not only do I not share that site with a large new audience, but they probably run in to that with other people who wanted to share their content. You want to download some of the major tools or sign up for free accounts and see what your site looks like when trying to share them. You could be missing out on a lot.
2. The second thing that I find can hurt people is forgetting to clearly label what is a share and what is a follow button. It is important to have both of them and even more important to label them clearly. I recommend putting share buttons by your copy and follow buttons in a static place across each page of your site. Then label the follow/friend/like us buttons with a follow us or friend us tag around them. It still amazes me how many sites don't label the follow section from the share.
3. When using social media icons, choose ones that don't take you off the page. Not only can you lose a visitor because they get distracted when they get to Facebook or another site, but why do you want them leaving your site anyways? There are a ton of icons you can use for sharing and following that open a new screen that disappears and keeps the person on your site. You may want to test and change yours out if your icons take people off of your site.
Although these seem somewhat obvious, it is amazing how many sites make it difficult to share their content and information. I highly recommend you go through your site and see what works with social and what you can do better to help generate more shares and get new visitors. By making it easier to share, you may end up getting more traffic and loyal customers or readers.