HOW TO DO EFFECTIVE SOCIAL MEDIA PROMOTION FOR YOUR BLOG

What’s the one job all types of bloggers have in common? Social media promotion.

But as we know, it can be really tough to get ourselves noticed online. I mean, you’d think with all the content you’re creating on a regular basis self-promotion would be easy, right?

We all know that’s not the case.

One of the most common mistakes bloggers can make is being active on every single social platform out there. They’ve got accounts on:

Instagram
Pinterest
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Google +
Snapchat
Tumblr

You’re going to get much better results by focusing on a smaller number of channels. It’s going to benefit you so much more if you’re amazing at a few platforms rather than being just okay at all of them.

So how do you know what to focus on and how to do even do social media promotion for your blog? It’s all about knowing where your audience is and what kinds of content they like to consume. Let’s dig into it in a bit more detail.

CHOOSE THE RIGHT PLATFORMS TO MANAGE

A lot of new bloggers think they have to be active on every single social media platform out there. But you can choose what platforms you want to manage and be active on. This is one of the biggest and most important decisions you can make as a blogger.

In terms of knowing which platforms are right for you, there are a couple of tactics you can try.

CHECK OUT YOUR COMPETITORS

I’m guessing you’ll have a list of a few competitor blogs in a document or in your head, right?

(If not, take 10-15 minutes and go do this now!)

What you want to do is take a look at their connected social media accounts and look out for patterns. For instance, if you’re a graphic designer you might have Instagram and Pinterest accounts because they’re visual, but not actively promote your Twitter account.

You can also make a note of the followers that your competitors have on each platform. This will give you a really good insight in terms of what channels they’re focusing on to build up their followers and engagement.

KNOW WHO YOU'RE TARGETING

This comes back to knowing your perfect reader. You won’t know what platforms you need for social media promotion unless you know who you’re targeting.

It’s like we said before. If your content is very visual, like a food blog, you might want to explore image-led social networks like Instagram and Pinterest. If your content is more text-based and you love the written word, you’ll want to make Twitter your main focus.

There’s no one-size fits all answer here. I’m a writer, yet I find success on Pinterest and Instagram.

It’s just about making sure that you have the capability to show up and deliver quality content on the platforms you choose to be active on. If you don’t have a content plan, or you find it difficult to come up with ideas, then maybe that platform isn’t for you.

MAKE SURE YOUR CONTENT IS SHAREABLE

You need to realise that the most social media promotion happens outside of your blog. For instance, most people will share my blog posts through Twitter and Pinterest. Your job is to make that as easy for your readers to do as possible. And to do that, you need social sharing buttons.

This is something that I recommend to all my blog coaching clients and it works like a charm. Just be sure you don’t include every social network on there - just the ones you’re active on and where you want people to share your content. SumoMe is a great tool that lets you do this and you can customise the bar to match your brand colours too.

You need to make your content so good that people share it with their friends.

But I want you to realise that people won’t share your content unless it is packed with value. That comes from what you put in your content and whether you offer them an incentive too, like an extra add-on to your blog post (like the one I’m sharing in this one!)

Another great idea is applying for Rich Pins on Pinterest and you should definitely do this if it’s one of your main promotional channels. It’s great to let people know exactly what website the pin is coming from and if you’re a food blogger, you can even add recipe cards.

FOCUS ON ENGAGEMENT NOT FOLLOWERS

It’s so easy to get caught up in the numbers trap and think that the follower count means everything. But that is not the key metric or the ONLY metric you should be paying attention to.

A metric that’s going to give you a real insight into how effective your social media promotion is, is your engagement. And remember, there are different engagement metrics to consider for each social channel.

But these are going to give you a proper picture in terms of who is engaging with your content and most importantly, how many people are clicking through to your website.

Each of the big platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest) all have great, built-in analytics tools with access to really useful data. This is your perfect starting point, so be sure to keep a monthly track.

Be sure to download the free checklist with this blog post to get a list of the exact metrics you need to track for each platform!

SCHEDULE YOUR CONTENT

Now I know a lot of you have been really struggling since Buffer removed their rebuffer tool. But retweeting your own tweets, isn’t going to cut it.

You need to use a tool to schedule your content! If Buffer isn’t working for you, I also really like using ContentCal as it allows you to reschedule posts.

But you also need to make sure you’re sharing your social updates at optimal times when you know your audience is online.

I’ve done a full tutorial on how I use Followerwonk to do this with Twitter which you can find here. But the best thing with this is it allows you to sync your own personalised social media promotion schedule to your Buffer account. Genius.

For Facebook, I’d use their Insights tool to get a better idea of when your audience is online. When it comes to Instagram you can use Squarelovin which is free (take a look at that tutorial here), or aim for a post in the morning and a post in the evening.

USE DIFFERENT MESSAGING FOR EACH PLATFORM

There are three HUGE mistakes I see people making when it comes to social media promotion for their blog. See if you’re guilty of any of these.

You share the same message to all your platforms.
You just grab the headline and include the link.
You say “hey a new blog post has gone live, please read it”.

Are you guilty?

This is not doing you any favours! If you want more clicks and shares with your blog content, you need to be optimising your messages for each individual platform.

Take this post for instance. Here’s what I’ll probably do for each platform:

Twitter - I’ll tell my followers what the blog post is about AND how they’re going to find value from it. It’s also good to include a call to action, e.g. Discover how to do effective social media promotion for your blog…
Facebook - I’ll usually do something a little longer where I’ll tell them what they’re going to get out of the post, but won’t give everything away so they want to click through and read it.
Instagram - I’ll try and make this more relatable by using a personal story and then prompting followers to the link in my bio if they want to read more about it.