Tips For Promoting Your Blog on Social Media

Tips for Promoting Your Blog on Social Media

You work hard on your blog content. You try to provide value, write in an engaging voice, and include killer images so people will enjoy every minute of reading your posts. Social Triggers tells us that most of the 164 million blogs on the internet, most get less than 1,000 visitors every month. The problem is, it’s not an “if you build it they will come” type of situation. In order to get traffic to your blog, you have to drive it there. Social media is a great way to do that. Let’s look at how.

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Promoting Blogs

Our friends at The Social Media Hat recently published a very comprehensive guide to promoting blog posts. They hit all the main points – from how to write your blog to how to promote it in every way. They have some great points, and we recommend you give their guide a read. We’re going to talk about social media specifically, and even more specifically, we’re going to break it down by Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. We’ll save Instagram for another time.

Promoting Your Blog on Twitter

Twitter’s 140 character limit can actually benefit you when promoting your blog posts. You have the chance to write a really snappy, compelling and short teaser for your blog post’s contents to entice someone to click through. But that’s just the beginning. First, remember to use short URLs so you can use your characters for the words that will draw readers in. Second, use strategic hashtags so that people who are searching for a trending subject will see your tweet.

Another tactic is to find people who have tweeted content similar to yours and reply to their tweet with a link to your blog post. A caveat – make sure that your blog content and title are relevant, and that in your reply you explain the benefit of someone reading your post. Otherwise, you could lose credibility.

You can also build a Twitter list for your blog content. Pick influencers who have shared your content in the past and target them for tweets containing relevant content for them.

Finally, don’t forget to include a visual in your tweet.

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Promoting Your Blog on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is your gateway to a huge network of professionals. The business network’s default setting is, when you share a link, it will post an update to your personal LinkedIn profile. This is great, because your connections and people who follow you will see that you’ve written a blog post, and since you have 600 characters to sell it to them, they will likely click – as long as you’ve written a compelling case for why they should.

It’s also helpful to join relevant LinkedIn Groups. Choose groups that relate to your industry, or groups that share and consume the type of content you create. For instance, if you are a software provider for Realtors, join a few Realtor groups and you’ll have a built-in audience. Once you’ve joined some groups, make sure it accepts linked posts and share your blog post. Feel free to customize your introductory copy for each group to make it even more meaningful for its members.

You can also send direct messages to the people you’re connected to. Be picky about this tactic, because you don’t want to come across as a spammer. Choose people who you think would truly benefit from your blog post and share it with them.

Promoting Your Blog on Facebook

Sharing your posts on Facebook can be tricky, because a lot of linked posts get swept under the proverbial Facebook rug. It’s still worth it to share your blog posts directly from your business’s Facebook page. Make sure the intro copy is compelling, and make sure your visual is particularly stunning. You don’t have to use the same photo that Facebook pulls in when you link your post.

Want to learn how to add a different photo to a linked post in Facebook? Watch our short video hack here.

Another great tactic with Facebook is to, like LinkedIn, share your post with specific groups. Odds are, if you’ve been marketing on Facebook for a while, that you belong to several groups in your industry. Share your blog post in each group, tailoring your intro copy to tell that group why they should read your blog post. You can also join blogging groups that have members that are happy to share interesting blog content with their readers.

Another thing to think about is Facebook’s authorship feature. I don’t know why someone wouldn’t use this feature. It allows you to add a byline to your content with the use of a meta tag. You know, a lot like Google’s authorship thing that died out a while ago. It’s a super powerful way to establish yourself as a thought leader, and to build your brand. For a step-by-step on how to enable this nifty tool, visit Mike again and read his post.

We hope you picked up a couple tricks you haven’t tried yet. If you know of other effective ways to share your content on social media, let us know in the comments!