Social Media Tips for Promoting Your Blog
Is your content marketing working for you or are you wasting your time writing mediocre posts? If not, you may not be marketing your content effectively.
Paid advertising makes little sense for blogs, unlike business websites. What are your other options?
The two go hand-in-hand, in my opinion.
In an earlier post, we discussed how to optimize your blog for search engines, and today we're going to talk about how to promote your blog using social media.
If you're a webmaster, a marketer, or a blogger, take a poll on what they think blogging on social media means. In actuality, sharing your blog on your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+ pages is not even half the battle when it comes to promoting your blog.
Then read on for some truly effective tips to make your blog shine across social media if you're ambitious about "marketing your blog on social media" and want to go beyond popular social networking sites.
Following are some ways you can share your blog posts on social media (other than the mundane Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) and some unique social platforms.
1. Content That Is Interesting, Useful, Or Shocking
The first step to success in social media marketing is not really related to social media marketing, but it is essential to all the other steps discussed today.
In other words, they won't just share ANY content on social media, but rather content that makes them appear smart and sophisticated.
It's important that the content you produce is intriguing and useful, containing information that's rare and seldom found anywhere else online. Even if the content is already found elsewhere, you must present it in a way that will engage your social networking-savvy audience.
Let's look at two aspects of content creation that will attract readers besides the content in your blog post.
Titles With Intrigue
Consider this example: You create a post about 10 Things You Must Ask Your SEO Agency. The title of this particular post sounds promising, but does it really catch your eye?
Consider a post that has a different title, "10 Things Your SEO Agency Isn't Telling You".
How excited are you now about this title? To some extent, isn't it?
In most cases, your blog subscribers who subscribe to your blog by email or RSS feed may also subscribe to blogs in your niche. By changing the tone and style of your posts' titles, you may be able to gain more exposure. If your readers are overwhelmed with information in their feed readers or inboxes, a creative title can help you stand out from the crowd.
Photographs
You will be less inclined to share your blog if you don't have an opening image (like we do at WooRank) or any image at all. Social media is all about big, colorful visuals. Take a look at how we use images on our own blog rather than taking any more explanation of these criteria.
A wide social media audience will be interested in intriguing images such as these. If they repost or share them, it will hopefully garner a lot of interest.
2. Your Blog Should Be Integrated With Social Media
We mean bridging the gap between popular social media sites and your content when we integrate social media into your blog. Having social media elements integrated into your blog is an easy way for visitors to share your blog content and connect with you.
You can integrate social media buttons into your blog that encourage readers to interact with your content (Facebook likes, Twitter follows), and share buttons that help your readers share your content. You can also integrate social media logins that allow readers to comment on your work.
To add social media sharing buttons to your post, follow these tips.
If you plan to put a button on your blog, it should be accompanied by enough social media traffic to make a button worthwhile. Don't go overboard with seven or eight social media buttons.
A crowded social media share button may turn off your readers, reducing the number of social shares. You may also experience slow page loading speeds if you add unnecessary social media widgets.
The WooRank blog below uses a minimal number of buttons. Using too many can be overkill.
3. Engage Your Social Media Followers With Your Blog
It's not rocket science to share your blog post on many social media platforms if readers don't come to your site. However, you need to get certain things right to be successful:
Continuity
Tools like Hootsuite and SproutSocial can help you share your content consistently. To make sure you maintain consistency, share your content on social media sites consistently.
In our previous post entitled Small Business Social Media Management Tools, we discussed some of these tools in more detail.
WordPress Automated
Publicize can be used to automatically share posts to your social media accounts when you publish a new article on your WordPress blog.
Posting At The Best Time
The free Twitter marketing tool Tweroid can help you determine the best time to post updates about your blog post on Twitter. It is one of the most useful Twitter marketing tools available today. It is possible to determine the optimal posting times for Facebook using its own analytics tool "Facebook Insights.
With buffer-follower wonk, you can schedule posts on Twitter and take advantage of the optimal user activity time.
Post Updates Have A Visual Appeal
To motivate users to read your blog post, write a message about it in your own words when you share it, whether it's on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+. Remember to include a photo with your post since many platforms (LinkedIn and Google+ included) display a thumbnail image automatically.
You can choose another image for your Facebook display by pressing the "+" button. Visit the following sample screenshot to see how to upload an external image:
Social media content shared from your blog can be enhanced aesthetically with these options.
Posting In Both Places
Social media platforms can be used to cross-post blog updates.
Consider, for instance, sharing a Facebook post that includes a nice graphic, or maybe even a quote. Your Facebook followers who also own Pinterest accounts can easily pin the image by sharing a link to its location on Pinterest. If your blog features many graphical elements, you should definitely have a Pinterest account.
Updates To All Posts
The whole blog post can be displayed on social media platforms, such as Google+ and Tumblr, whereas other platforms only allow a few text characters in updates. Your social media traffic will be increased if you provide a link to the original blog post URL at the end of the post.
Your blog post can also be shared on Tumblr using the publicize plugin. However, the teaser will not be shared.
You gain a high PR (PR 6) link from a high PR (PR 6) website even if you do not get traffic from Tumblr by transferring whole posts to your Tumblr profile.
The advantage of Google+ is that it is Google's own social network. For useful keywords, you can often find complete Google+ posts on the first page of Google search results.
Tweet Click Here
Depending on your reader's mood, you may want to incorporate a click to Tweet option for various quotes in your blog post. This will automatically create a link back to your blog from the reader's Twitter profile.
The Hashtag
Your blog's findability is improved when you add hashtags with relevant keywords to your tweets, Facebook posts, and Google+ updates.
Tweeting and Facebooking about hashtags are topics we discuss in our posts on Tweeting Tips to Promote Your Company and Facebooking Tips to Promote Your Brand.
Messages Sent Directly
Message your fans and followers in direct messages (or in private messages) to let them know about new blog posts.
A word of caution, however, is not to overdo it and thereby increase the number of unfollows or dislikes you receive on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Reaching out personally can go a long way to increasing a post's reach on social networks.
4. Get In Touch With Other Bloggers And Form Relationships
Having an understanding of other blogs in the same niche is helpful, but how do you put that information to work for you? Here are some quick tips on using other bloggers' influence to promote your own blog.
Share And Read
Tweet to acknowledge or appreciate other bloggers' posts by reading and sharing their posts. If you are commenting on a post, make sure to @mention the blogger's Twitter handle. You can also leave comments on the posting page, but this method will notify the blogger immediately.
The blogger will likely check out your blog and possibly return the favor in a similar manner if you have included your blog's URL in your Twitter bio (there's no reason why you shouldn't).
Experts Are Listed Below
The bloggers will appreciate a link back and will post about it on their social media platforms. Create a "Top 10 Bloggers in (Your Niche)" post and link back to them.
The same method can also be followed for niche experts who do not have blogs. If you mention them on social media, they will most likely share your post.
Blogging By Guests
By letting bloggers from your niche guest post on your blog, and by returning the favor by doing the same, you will get links from your niche, and your blog will be featured in their social media updates.
Content Buzz on Viral Websites
Using social media channels for mutual content distribution, you can create viral content buzz through the viral content buzz community.
5. Posts On Your Blog Should Be Socially Shared
If you want to gain a large amount of traffic from social bookmarking, your blog posts should be shared on high-profile sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Reddit that have a good audience. However, keep in mind that social bookmarking has been overused in the past, so it is not as effective as it once was.
This will encourage increased activity on your own bookmarks as well as be able to make your presence felt on social bookmarking sites.
You should stick to a handful of social bookmarking sites and update them regularly; there are many on the web.
There are ten link-building strategies for small businesses in this post that list such sites.
6. Promotions In Forums
It is rare to be allowed to share your blog link on many good forums in almost all niches unless you have been a frequent user and are helping your fellow members. If you plan to spend quality time on forums in your niche, you should only apply this social media blog promotion tip.
For example, a food blog + forum will give you forums in your niche. You can also use Boardreader to look for blogs and forums in your niche.
7. Socialize With Your Friends
Join Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups relevant to your niche. This is a great way to get your blog and yourself recognized. In the beginning, try to help people with their questions. You could eventually share links to your blog posts. Instead of promoting your blog aggressively, start by joining conversations and helping people with questions.
Organize a virtual meetup, or a real one, using Google Hangouts and Twitter Chat. Both are great ways to mingle with your friends.
You can use Google Hangouts in a few simple ways.
You can join a Twitter chat in an informal way or make pre-arranged arrangements by @mentioning the participants.
8. Blog Posts From The Past Shouldn't Be Forgotten
Sharing old or relevant blog posts has the potential to gain a lot of traffic on social media when you share them.
In your social media updates, you can change the titles of your old blog posts so that your older followers don't see the same post twice.
9. Content Parts to Share
If you prefer, you can share more significant parts of your post as social media updates instead of just using the click-to-tweet plugin. You don't have to include links to your blog with such posts. Your fans and followers will enjoy this fresh variation of updates.
As a bonus, social media signals also contribute to your blog's search engine ranking. So, here are some quick ways to promote your blog on social media.
Got questions? Visit us @ www.sirkle.com and we’re happy to help.
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