We recently sat down with Jim Pugh, the CEO of ShareProgress, a website and social sharing optimization tool, to discuss how ShareProgress helps clients recruit supporters via social sharing.  In our last blog post, we touched upon the importance of optimizing referral traffic through share content testing. ShareProgress is a paid tool that can make it easier for you to get results from share optimization.

It’s easy to use ShareProgress. There are two functions available through their web tool. One is for optimizing share pages, which come after supporters take an online action, such as signing a petition or attending an event. The other function is for optimizing share content, from any page.

In addition to optimizing the after action share page layout, ShareProgress provides the opportunity to test variations on the actual content that is shared when someone posts to Facebook, shares by email, or shares on other social networks.  There are two ways that this is done.  On the standard share pages, you just have to add new variations in the CMS to test additional variations when setting up the share page.

In addition, you can create a share button for any page on ShareProgress to be embedded on your site.  Once embedded, the share button will create different variations of the posts for the page when a visitor Shares on Facebook and then track how the content is performing on ShareProgress.

After the share page is created, you can view the number of people visiting the page, and which variation of the page content and share content is performing best. In addition, ShareProgress tracks how many generations of sharing are occurring, so you can see just how far it is being shared.

One of the great functionalities that ShareProgress also provides is to determine which version is performing better based on real time statistical analysis and automatically default to that version of the share page or share content.  This built-in automation means less to think about and manage manually. The best version is determined based on early results and later visitors to the site will all see the winning version.

But is it worth it?

In a conversation with Kimberly Muñoz of ShareProgress, she said that many organizations and companies have been copying what Upworthy and Buzzfeed suggest for viral content (such as creating a curiosity gap), but that doesn’t always work.

In ShareProgress’ work with Credo on petitions, for example, they found in testing prefixes that direct headlines work better, rather than creating a curiosity gap. Credo got 20% better results on Facebook with headlines that prep supporters to take an action. After all, they’re competing against cute baby pics!

In terms of referrals and share content, testing on Twitter and email has shown that what brings people back is personal, personable content that rings of a personal endorsement, such as: “I signed this, now will you?” People only care about jerrymandering and other such topics if it’s from a friend they like. Storytelling through the Story of Self practice helps people speak authentically about what they care about.

Muñoz noted, “A good takeaway is the Upworthy recommendation for coming up with a great headline — write 25 headlines but also test the ones with the most potential. Especially if it’s a small list, test the ones that are the most different, rather than similar headlines, which need a larger sample size.”

You can read more about ShareProgress’ successes on their blog. Contact our Fission team if you’d like to talk about any campaign ideas you’re inspired about!