17 Tips To Promote Your Blog With Social Media

How To Promote Your Blog with Social Media

Plenty of bloggers think that social media is the easiest way to gain traffic for their blogs.

The reality, however, is far from that.

Yes, it’s true that social media is a very effective way to promote your blog, but getting results isn’t exactly that easy.

Many bloggers can attest to this.

This is why some have toned down their efforts on social media.

Has this discouraged you from looking into social media marketing? If it has, I’d like to tell you that it shouldn’t.

In fact, you can take advantage of social media, and these 17 tips below will show you how you can do so effectively.

1. Choose Your Platforms Wisely

People love bloggers who are tech savvy. That much is true. This is why you may want to sign up for all major social media networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest.

Another reason why you may want to sign up for all major social media networks is to prevent your efforts from ever going into waste in case the few or one social media network you relied on failed or shut down. Just look at what happened to the once-booming social network known as Myspace.

The next thing you need to do is to monitor which of your accounts get the most interactions.

Try to update all your social media accounts (with the help of automated tools) as much as possible but slowly focus on sites where most of your target audience is, or where you get the most interactions.

And of course, it’s best that you have determined your target audience first. To do this, you need to define who you are writing for and why you are writing for them.

For example, you are a gamer who writes articles about esports and gaming in general. It would be safe to say that your target audience would be gamers.

Now, ask yourself which social networks most gamers frequent. Is it Facebook? Youtube? Twitter?


How to determine where your target audience is:

  • Do research on current social media statistics. Common search queries would be “Social Media Statistics *Insert Year* or “Which social media should I be on?”
  • Look at what social media networks your competition is using
  • Or you can read this: 5 Tips for Finding and Engaging Your Target Audience

2. Have a Complete Profile

How do you usually get attracted to someone you don’t know? For their presentable appearance, right? Just like in social media networks, you need to look credible in order to attract more followings. So make sure to have your profile complete and add everything you need to add to look presentable.


Checklist to make sure that you do yours properly:

  • Upload a professional-looking photo or a photo relevant to your niche or industry.
  • Make use of the description. Try to describe what your blog is all about in as few words as possible without compromising quality.
  • Do not forget to add your blog URL.
  • Make it public. There is no reason to keep a profile private.
  • Promote brand awareness by using your blog’s logo and styles whenever and wherever possible, such as in your banners, and even in your profile picture.

3. Post Updates and Do It Regularly

Having many social media accounts is not just going to cut it. Not only must you share your blog’s posts and content through those accounts, you must post updates whenever possible as well.


In posting updates, you have to make sure of the following:

  • Avoid posting irrelevant information. Keep status updates useful, informative and relevant to your blog and niche.
  • Do it as consistently as possible.
  • Share a wide variety of content, ranging from trivia, to tips, to special deals, etc.
  • Make each update as if you were talking to one person at a time.
  • Make use of eye-catching visual content such as infographics if possible.

4. Use Automated Tools

As you come to use your social media accounts more often, you will realize that you just cannot keep up with your readers anymore. Does this mean you have to quit or be less active in your other accounts? No!

To help you manage your accounts, you can use automated and auto-schedule tools.

Personally, I would recommend Hootsuite, Buffer or Sproutsocial. Either of the three works fine, and each of them have their own personal advantages or disadvantages.

5. Make Use of Paid Content Promotion

Paid content promotion is a risky venture, but there is potential for big gains if it pans out.

To keep risks at a minimum, however, start with a small budget. Get to know what your target market needs. Take the time to research their behavior, habits.

More importantly, experiment on which paid content promotion methods work for you by measuring which have the best results.

Remember, Facebook alone boasts over a billion registered users. Even if only a fraction of that is active, we’re still talking about millions of people, thousands of which could be part of your target market.

6. Share in a Timely Manner

This will take a bit of experimenting, but if you do it, it will boost the number of traffic to your blog from your social media accounts.

What you need to do is to set up weekly experiments wherein you will be engaging with your readers using social media and sharing posts only on certain times of the day, changing the time of activity per week until you come up with enough data to compare which times of the day your readers are more active.

7. Have a Proper Strategy

Each social network is different. They have different layouts, interfaces and most important of all, they have different means of communication.

You need to understand how each social network works and how you can use each one more effectively to communicate with your target audience.

For example, you need to learn how users of each social network communicate and share posts. This way, you will learn how YOU should share posts using such social networks as well.

If all else fails, observe what works for your competitors and how they go about their posts. You will learn a lot if you take the time to “shadow” them.

Do remember that it’s important that you tailor each message for each network so as to show to your readers that you really are putting an effort to communicate with them.

8. Engage With Your Followers

Your followers are your best asset. After all, they are your readers. This is why you must take care of them.

Simple things such as thanking them for reporting and sharing your content, answering back to any of their questions, holding contests, posting surveys and polls, or better yet, asking them what they want you to feature on your blog, etc.

All of these things go a long way in establishing not only brand awareness, but also loyalty.

9. Engage With People In Your Industry

You must make it a point to establish relationships with people within your network, namely, those in your niche.

Talk to them. Engage with them. Share their posts or content using your social media accounts. If you like, support their events or campaigns.

Remember, by establishing relationships with people within your niche, both your readers and other bloggers will come to respect you and your blog’s content.

10. Do Not Overshare

While using social media encourages you, as a blogger, to share information, there is still such a thing as sharing too much.

Flooding your accounts with too many posts (even if they’re relevant) will annoy most of your followers, as they will be receiving updates far too often than they’d like.

To keep things safe, try to share content only every few hours or so.

11. Follow back people that interests you

As you actively engage with your followers, make sure that you keep an eye out for followers that may interest you.

They can come from a different niche or industry, or they can be in the same niche as you are. Either way, if they interest you, try to engage with them as well personally and see if you can build a mutual relationship between the two of you.

12. Participate in groups or communities actively

Actively seek out groups or communities filled with people that are also active in your niche. Yes, they can be your competition. But, you should not forget that you could learn a lot from them as they may have more experience than you do.

Also, by engaging in such groups and communities, you help establish yourself as an authority in your niche, as well as the visibility of your blog.

13. Organize your schedule

With all the things that you have to do as you handle your blog/s and social media accounts, it can be easy for you to lose track of things.

To prevent this from happening, you need to organize your schedule. You need to make sure that you have certain times of the day/week where you will be doing research, when you will be sharing posts or looking for content to share and most important of all, you need to set aside time to write.

To help you do this, you can use tools such as Evernote to help you keep track of your progress and what things you have to do.

14. Hire social media manager

Social media managers know how social media networks work. They work on multiple accounts and have access to tools that make it easier for them to distribute and share content anytime you want them to.

While it’s possible for you to do what they are doing, they have far more experience than you do. As such, they can handle much of the social media aspects of your blogger so much better than you can.


Where you can find social media managers:

Make sure to look at social media managers who have excellent feedback in their profiles and have lots of credentials.

15. Make Use of Google Analytics and Similar Tools


3 important factors and these are:

  • Reach. This includes the number of page likes in Facebook, number of followers in Twitter, subscribers in Youtube, Visitors to your blog, as well as connections in Linkedin.

  • Engagement. This is the number of comments in your Facebook posts, status, blog posts, Linkedin, number of shares, retweets, mentions, etc.

  • Conversion. This is the number of online sales, lead generated, registrations or subscriptions to content, phone-in leads and the likes that come from social media, or rather, the increase when you first started marketing through social media networks.

For Reach and Engagement, you can use Cyfe or Crowdbooster as this software will help you track and analyze data coming from your social media accounts. As for Conversion, the all-popular Google Analytics is the best choice.

16. Avoid the drama

It’s in the nature of blogging that you will eventually receive negative criticism. Some may be against your posts, while some may even go to great lengths as to disprove any of your points, or even destroy your reputation.

As tempting as it’s to fight back, never do this. You need to handle these things professionally and the best way to do so is to just ignore such comments. If possible, delete them.

If you do, however, have to respond, make sure that you do so in a polite way.

17. Have FUN!

Finally, one tip that you should never forget is to always have fun as you manage your content and your social media accounts.

Yes, it will be stressful. Yes, it will come with risks. Yes, it will come with sleepless nights. However, as long as you remember to have fun while you do so, everything will eventually pan out.

Conclusion

As much as I would like to say that you must learn from your own mistakes, learning from the mistakes of others is the more efficient way for you to learn.

Remember, a wise man learns not from his own mistakes, but from the mistakes of others.

These 17 tips above will serve you well as you use social media as a means of driving more traffic to your blog and gaining more revenue.

So, jump on the bandwagon and use social media to promote your blog now.

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