Promoting your blog is the most important of the five Ps of blogging. Without getting the word out about your blog, your content will never maximize its reach. To end this, leverage Facebook and Twitter to support your promotional blog activities.
The logic behind Facebook and Twitter blog promotion is to take advantage of their broad, global reach.
Therefore understand Facebook and Twitter participant behavior. Specifically, a significant proportion of these users snack on social media content and engage via a smartphone or a tablet. (Here’s the data on Facebook and Mobile.) So your blog must present information appropriate for these behaviors. (Here’s how to optimize your blog for mobile via Ian Cleary.)
Here are twenty-five actionable tactics to help you use Facebook and Twitter to promote your blog.
Get your blog in order for Facebook and Twitter sharing
Before disseminating your blog content on Facebook and Twitter, ensure that your blog is positioned appropriately and craft each post considering your audience to facilitate sharing.
- Know your target audience and their hot buttons. While you may think your blog is about what you want to convey, the reality is that to attract a consistent readership, you must write for your audience. This means creating a marketing persona to understand their needs and priorities and a social media persona to understand where they congregate and interact on social media.
- Write regular features responding to your audience’s needs and interests. To keep readers returning, create content that they seek and schedule it to appear on a consistent basis. (Here’s how to create stellar content.)
- Include a featured image as a reader magnet. Photographs, visuals and infographics pull readers in, especially if they contain images of people.
- Craft alluring headlines to attract an audience. Headlines matter! Make sure they’re specific enough to target your core readership. (Here are tips to write winning titles.)
- Format blog posts to facilitate consumption. Structure your content to enable visitors to consume it quickly. Understand readers may snack on content or save longer pieces for later consumption.
Tool up your blog for Facebook and Twitter
Beyond crafting posts to attract readers, use your blog platform to facilitate and encourage Facebook and Twitter sharing.
- Ask visitors to follow you on Facebook and Twitter in your sidebar. Leverage your blog’s real estate to get readers to engage with you on other social media entities. Remember blog visitors may spend time on these social platforms but may not return to your blog.
- Include social sharing icons at the top and bottom of every blog post. Give readers a visual clue to share your content with their followers and communities.
Do the basics for Facebook and Twitter
These activities are similar for both social media platforms. When leveraging Facebook and Twitter for your blog, create both a personal account and a separate blog account to extend your social media reach and keep blog communications separate. This is particularly important for businesses blogs since these accounts shouldn’t be associated with one employee.
- Complete your personal profile. Incorporate your blog URL in your social media profiles. This is can entice readers to your blog.
- Create a blog profile. Provide information about your blog, its URL, current description and gravatar. Use a name that’s consistent with that of your blog.
- Incorporate your blog’s brand into your Facebook timeline photograph, Twitter image and background. Part of the reason to use social media is to build your blog’s brand; therefore ensure that your Facebook Page and Twitter Profile use identifiable blog brand elements.
- Participate on Facebook and Twitter. Social media is more than a push channel to shout ME, ME, Me. Therefore, add to the conversation and curate other people’s articles.
- Get your blog buddies to cross promote each other’s blog posts. Share your buddies’ posts on your Facebook and Twitter profiles and in return they share yours on their profiles.
- Monitor what your competitors are doing on Facebook and Twitter. Use your personal account to follow and/or engage. This helps build relationships with people who may be interested in your content and yields insights into other topics to cover on your blog.
Build your blog’s presence on Facebook
As the largest social media entity globally, you need a Facebook presence to support your blog. (To get your Facebook presence on track, read Jon Loomer’s blog.)
- Like your post on your own Facebook profile. This will make it appear in your newsfeed. Maximize its impact by adding a tailored comment.
- Share your post on your blog fan page. Handcraft the related information. Also ask a question to start a conversation. (Note: If you do this, be prepared to participate in the discussion.)
- Create a graphic of your post information. Images get more views on Facebook and take up more space in the newsfeed. Also, incorporate the image into your post.
- Pay for views. Use Facebook’s promoted posts to support your stronger blog content and broaden readership.
- Create a Facebook app to encourage blog email registrations.Take advantage of your Facebook traffic to build your blog’s email house file.
Maximize your blog reach via Twitter
Engage on Twitter’s real time conversation to build your following and learn more about your niche.
- Tweet each blog post three to four times the day it’s published.Bear in mind social media followers live in different timezones.
- Break blog posts into tweetable chunks. For longer posts, lists and roundups, maximize content sharing by developing a set of tweets posted over a longer period of time.
- Pre-format tweets for reader use. This is particularly useful for data roundups and quotes. Use ClicktoTweet to encourage tweeting.
- Add optimal hashtags to extend reach. Consider the relevance of the content for the hashtag’s audience. Keep hashtag use to a maximum of three and separate them from the text of your message.
- Use a scheduling tool to publish your tweets. These tools enable you to set the time your tweets will appear.
- Thank people for sharing your blog posts. Everyone likes to get recognized and a thank you helps build social media relationships.
- Participate in relevant Twitter chats. At a minimum, join #BlogChat on Sunday nights to learn how to optimize your blog and socialize with other bloggers.
Leverage the power of Facebook and Twitter to expand your blog audience. Don’t overlook the fact that you need to craft your blog posts to feed these two social media entities and keep readers returning to your blog.
Source – [HeidiCohen]
