Social media has become one of the most effective tools for writers who want to make their blogs more popular. Reaching new readers, however, isn’t as simple as posting links to profiles on Facebook and Twitter. You have to take a strategic approach that uses the best features of each platform and convinces people to share your content.
The next time you want to promote your blog on social media, use these five strategies.
Focus on Social Media Platforms That Work for You
Trying to manage profiles on too many social media platforms will make it impossible for you to write high-quality posts. If you spread yourself too thin, your work will suffer.
Instead of trying to post to as many social media sites as possible, focus on the ones that will work best for you. Since Facebook and Twitter have the most users, most bloggers use them to reach new fans. Facebook has about 1.59 billion monthly active users. Twitter has over 320 million. You can’t deny the potential advantages of using these platforms.
When looking at additional options, consider how each platform’s features would benefit your talents. For instance, if you take beautiful pictures, you’ll want to look at Pinterest, Instagram, and Flickr. If you enjoy making videos, try posting your work to YouTube. If you don’t pick the correct platform for your niche and audience, you’ll struggle to see the results you deserve.
Take Advantage of Curated Content
Writing excellent content will bring readers to your blog, but it can take years before you get the kind of following that makes your website profitable.
Curated content is one of the best ways for you to gain access to the fans of other bloggers. Curated content involves searching the internet for great articles, videos, pictures, and other types of content. Instead of writing your own blog post about the things you find, you incorporate the top content into the article. For instance, if you primarily write about music, you may want to make a curated content article that includes album reviews from bloggers who publish on popular music sites like Pitchfork, Consequence of Sound, Tiny Mix Tapes, and Stereogum.
After posting curated content to your blog, send a note to the writers you quote and paraphrase. With some luck, they may respond by sharing your article with their readers. Suddenly, you have thousands of people looking at your website because you used curated content in a smart way.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that curating content is easy. It takes a lot of hard work to do well. CopyPress has a white paper titled How to Effectively Do Curation that will give you plenty of tips to help you make the most of your curated content.
Use Visuals in Your Posts
If you’re promoting a blog post, one of the best ways to increase engagement on social media is to add a featured image. Visual content added to a social post will increase the click-throughs to your internal page. In fact, researchers found that colored visuals increase a person’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80%.
Images will help your follower better understand the context of the post and can break up the monotony of text in their newsfeed. If you are trying to add imagery to your posts, it is important that you use the proper dimensions of the image to increase its effectiveness. Also, consider modifying the image to add branding or text to better communicate the information that the follower can expect.
Using visuals in your social media posts is a great way to drive more visitors to your blog and increase follower engagement on your social pages.
Promote Older Content at Relevant Times
Creating new content is one of the most important things you can do to make your blog grow in popularity. Many times, though, you can benefit from sharing older content that has relevance to recent events. If you wrote a review of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 phone when it came out in August, you might want to share the review again to take advantage of renewed interest after the device’s recall.
This is especially the case for evergreen content, or content that doesn’t become irrelevant over time. Evergreen content should be a staple of your content marketing strategy and an anchor in your social posts throughout the year.
To help manage the sharing of older content, it is important that you keep everything organized and labeled. For your blog, this includes using tags and structured titles to make it easy for you to quickly sort and find older posts.
Include a Synopsis or Question in Social Media Posts
Potential readers, whether they already follow you or they just stumble across your post, are more likely to click your link when they know what the content is about. Proving a short synopsis temps people to visit your website to read more of your content.
Always write accurate synopses that offer a good overview of your posts. If you lead people on with sensationalized descriptions, they will lose trust in you quickly. Once that trust is lost, you’ll never get it back.
You can also tempt readers by posing questions in your social media posts. If you’re trying to popularize a post about saving money for college, you might post “Are you using these four strategies to make college affordable” to your social media platforms. Asking a question makes people want to know the answer, so it can increase traffic to your website. Assuming that you provide a reliable answer to the question, people will start to associate your blog with smart, incisive information that benefits them.
There aren’t any shortcuts to promoting your blog on social media, but there are several strategies that can bring more attention to your work. Remember, find the right social platform, use curation as a supplement, include visuals, recycle old posts, and add your own twists. If you follow these five tips, you’ll start generating traffic to your blog from social media in no time.