How to make use of social media to market your blog

You’d be right if you think that new social networks are being developed and marketed every single month. There are quite significant social networks as well as niche social networks. There are tonnes of opportunities for you to promote your blog on each and every one of the social networks. However, for most bloggers out there, it’s not reasonable to attempt to make use of all of them.

Some people who regularly publish on blogs have tried utilising every social network. The feeling is that quantity is better than quality. However, the typical result of following this course of action is multiple accounts with little to no interaction. And having inactive social accounts is much worse than having no social media presence whatsoever because you’re giving the impression that your blog is no longer active.

Quality over quantity

A better strategy for using social media to promote your blog is to focus on only a couple of social networks or just one social network. But then, this begs the question: “Which social network is the best to concentrate on?

The first step that you should be taking is to identify who your target reader is. What you need to do is to identify your target reader. The next thing that you need to do is to identify the social networks that your target readers prefer.

The second step is to ascertain the traffic potential of the target social networks. In our  experience, the social media sites that refer the highest volume of traffic to blogs are:

• Facebook,
• Twitter,
• Pinterest, and
• LinkedIn

The traffic varies and depends on your target readers:

• If your blog post is more focused on professional readers as well as business, you may possibly have more traffic from a business-to-business network such as LinkedIn.
• If your target reader is more visually focused, it might make more sense to focus only on Facebook, Pinterest as well as Instagram.

Once you begin to receive traffic from social networks, it will be possible for you to analyse the traffic in order to determine if your target reader is visiting your blog. In your analytics, keep a close eye on bounce rates for your posts. Categorise traffic from social media networks. By doing this, you’ll be able to determine if traffic from specific networks provide better traffic than others.

Make the links to your blog visible

Social media users won’t want to hunt for your content or, alternatively, a hidden link to your blog. Make it very simple for them to find you. Put a link to your blog on all of your social media channels. Make it easy to find and simple to navigate. When your social media content speaks to them, they’ll want to find out more about you. Thus you need to make it simple for them to connect with you as well as access your blog.

In addition, make a point of trying to keep your handles relatively the same across all of your platforms. This will make it much simpler for your audiences to find you. This will also make it easier for you to build a cohesive as well as recognisable brand.

Make your content unique

Even though almost all social media channels have the same fundamental foundations – such as sharing content and connecting with others – that is really the only tie which binds them. Each network is unique and operates using different models.

However, the way that you promote your blog on social media cannot be generic. The promotion and marketing of your blog on Instagram will most probably not work on Facebook. What works on Twitter will certainly not work on Pinterest. Social content which is just copied onto each platform is not only lazy, but it could be off-putting to audiences as this repeat approach can appear spammy.

As you put in place plans to promote your blog posts on social media, take each platform – as well as their unique characteristics – into account. Tailor your content to each platform according to the mechanics of each channel.

Successfully promoting your blog on social media isn’t rocket science. However, you need a plan to do this – it can’t be haphazard.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

To learn more about using social media marketing to promote your blog, you should really consider doing a social media marketing course that is similar to the one we offer. For more information, please follow this link.