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Do you spend precious time writing killer, quality content for your blog? Do you reap all the benefits from your content marketing? If not, you may not be marketing your content effectively!
Unlike business websites, it does not make much sense to promote your blog through paid ads. But what other options are there?
SEO and social media marketing, of course.
And since we have already discussed SEO for blogs in a previous post, today we are going to shed a little light on how to promote your blog on social media.
Try taking a survey among webmasters, marketers or bloggers on what they think it means to promote blogs on social media. The majority would say that it means to share your blog on your profile or page on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+. But actually, doing this is not even half the battle
So, if you are among the ambitious and would like to go beyond popular social networking sites in the name of “marketing your blog on social media”, suggest you read on for some truly effective tips to make your blog shine across social media.
The following are some ways you can prepare your blog content to be socially shareable, and some unique social platforms (other than the mundane Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) to share your blog posts on.
1. Intriguing/Useful/Shocking Content
This tip is not really related to social media marketing but it is the essential first step that sets up all the other steps listed here today for success.
Your social media audience wants the content they share to make them appear cool and sophisticated. In other words, they won’t just share ANY content.
So, the content you produce must be intriguing and useful, containing unique information rarely found anywhere else. Even if the content is found in other places on the web, the way you present your content must be intriguing enough for your social media savvy readers.
Apart from your blog post’s content, readers will be attracted by intriguing titles and images. Let’s take a quick look at these two aspects of content creation.
Intriguing Titles
Say you create a post about 10 Things You Must Ask Your SEO Agency. The title of this particular post seems like it is going to give you useful content. But does it really excite you? Hold on to that thought.
Say you name the same post differently ““ 10 Things Your SEO Agency Is Not Telling You.
Does this title excite you now? It does to an extent, right?
A little change in the tone and style of your posts’ titles may get you more exposure. This is because often email or RSS feed subscribers of your blog may have subscribed to other blogs in your niche too. With overcrowded information lists in their feedreader or inboxes, a creative title may save you from getting lost in the crowd.
Take a look at a sample screenshot of a list of blog titles as seen in a feed reader. Incidentally, all of the titles shown are intriguing enough to tempt the reader to open it. Eventually, the reader will share it if he/she finds the content interesting.
Images
Social media is all about sexy visuals that are big and colorful. If your blog does not have a unique/recognizable opening image (for example, like we do at WooRank) or any image at all, people will be less inclined to share it. Rather than explain any more of this criteria why don’t you take a tour of our own blog to see how we use images.
To help, there are free tools for creating blog graphics, likeCanva. You can also share infographics, which are images containing the content. You will find free tools to create infographics in our previous post on the topic
Shown below is an example of a blog graphic that is worth sharing on social media.
It is intriguing images such as these that will attract the attention of a wider social media audience. As a result, these friends will hopefully re-post and share.
2. Integrate Social Media With Your Blog
By integrating social media into your blog, we mean bridging the gap between popular social media sites and your content. People who visit your blog need an easy way to connect with your blog and share your blog content via social media elements that are integrated into your site.
These integrating elements could be in the form of social media buttons that help your readers engage with your blog (Facebook likes, Twitter follows), share buttons that help readers share your content, social media logins to that help readers comment on your blog, and so on.
Here are some quick tips on adding social media share buttons to your post.
Some blogs go overboard and provide seven or eight social media buttons. Make sure you have a big enough audience on social media sites (other than the conventional Twitter and Facebook) to make a button worthwhile.
Crowding social media share buttons may put your readers off and this will affect the number of social shares. Also, adding unnecessary social media widgets may slow down your page loading speed.
Using buttons is fine, but too many can be overkill. Try to keep the button count minimal, like you see below on the WooRank blog.
Too many buttons can look cluttered and diverts attention away from the actual content.
Find out more about social media integration tools and techniques. 3. Share Your Blog Across Your Social Media Profiles
If readers are not coming to your site, go to them instead. Share your blog posts on as many social media sites as you can. You are probably already doing this, as it’s not rocket science. But getting certain things right will help your efforts:
Consistency
Share posts at a consistent frequency. Do not share them all at once for a week and then be a no-show the following week. To make sure you maintain consistency in sharing your content to social media sites you can use scheduling tools, such as Hootsuite and SproutSocial.
Learn more about these tools from one our previous posts titled Social Media Management Tools For Small Businesses.
Automate On WordPress
If you own a WordPress Blog, you can use the Publicize plugin to automatically send your freshly published posts to your social media pages.
When Is the Best Time to Post? If you are posting updates about your blog post on Twitter, check the optimum time to post them using the tool Tweroid. It is one of the very useful free twitter marketing tools on the market. Check the optimum posting times for Facebook using it’s own analytics tool ““ Facebook Insights.
If you want a scheduling tool that also gives optimal user-activity time for Twitter, you could use the buffer-followerwonk duo that were integrated to make social media posting easier and more productive on Twitter.
Visual Appeal Of Post Updates
When you share a blog post, say on Facebook, LinkedIn or a Google+ page, write a message in your own words about the post to motivate users to read it. Always remember to share a photo with the post as most platforms (LinkedIn and Google+ included) automatically display a thumbnail image from the post.
Facebook also automatically displays the post images, and allows you to choose a different display photo than the one Facebook grabbed. All you do to upload an external image is press the “+” button. Take a look at the sample screenshot below:
These various options help improve the aesthetic appeal of your blog post content shared on social media.
Cross Posting
Cross post your blog updates from one social media platform to another.
Say, for example, you share a post on Facebook and the post has a nice graphic, maybe even with a quote. You can share a link to the location of that image on Pinterest (you should definitely have a Pinterest account if your blogs have lots of graphical elements). This will encourage your Facebook followers who also own a Pinterest account to easily pin the image.
Whole Post Updates
Unlike other social media platforms that allow only a few text characters in updates, some social media platforms like Google+ and Tumblr actually allow you to display the whole blog post. At the end of the post you can give a link to the original blog post URL and this will get you some quality social media traffic.
In fact, the publicize plugin we mentioned earlier can also help you publish your blog post on Tumblr. It will share a teaser, however, and not the whole post.
The advantage of having whole posts copied to your Tumblr profile is that Tumblr users get to read them without being re-directed to your site. In which case, even if you do not acquire traffic from Tumblr you do still benefit a link from a high PR (PR 6) website.
On Google+, however, you have greater advantage of exposure, as this particular social platform is Google’s own product. Full Google+ posts are often found on the first page of Google search results, for the right keywords.