10 TIPS TO GROW YOUR BLOG USING SOCIAL MEDIA
The best and simplest way to promote a blog is with social media, and everybody knows that, but what does it actually mean? Do you just mention your new blog on Facebook? Do you tweet out links to your stuff? Then what?
This is where a large number of people get stuck, and worse, it can be very disheartening. “Use social media” is hardly an instruction manual, and it barely even qualifies as a tip! You need real answers and objectives, and that’s what I hope to give you.
1. Mention your blog on Facebook
Okay, I know I said that this is a very basic tip, but it is still a pretty important step. If you can get a few of your friends and people you know involved in your blog early on you will have a great head start on getting some activity going, which is more important than some people assume. A blog with a few people posting in the comments encourages more to join in, and once that begins to happen those visitors are much more likely to keep coming back.
2. Tweet out links to your stuff.
See that one coming? I’ll get into some more detail as we go here, but this should not be overlooked either, and there is a bit of finesse required to promote your blog through Twitter correctly. You don’t want to simply automate the process and have a link posted to your Twitter account every single time you update, but you do want to promote those articles that you think your followers will connect with, share, and might retweet and spread even further.3. Promote your Facebook page as if it was your blog.
You might feel weird about putting energy into driving traffic to a page that is not owned by you, but your site’s Facebook page is a marketing portal and a gateway into your brand and content. People are more likely to trust links to pages within Facebook, and once they are there they have already shown enough interest to virtually guarantee they will give your blog a good look.
4. Interact on Twitter directly. Don’t just spam!
You should go beyond talking about your own content and engage directly with people who are talking about things related to what you do. You don’t have to slip your URL into every message in that conversation either. You’re just establishing your presence and gaining new followers, and they will see the links you tweet out regularly.
5. Make your Twitter valuable, like its own service.
Taking that a step further, consider doing more with your Twitter account than just talking about your blog and what you had for breakfast. For example, if your website is about knitting you might post quick tips and links to information you find around the web, even if it doesn’t drive traffic to your website. When your Twitter feed becomes a service in its own right your follower count will skyrocket, and your self-promotion will get a lot more attention.
6. Understand different audiences.
Facebook users are not necessarily the same as Twitter or Google+ users, and this is something that most bloggers seem to fail to recognize. It really does depend on your niche and who you have following you, but as a general rule of thumb you can expect Facebook users to be a bit older than Twitter users, who are younger and often more into trends and hip things, while Google+ is populated by a very large number of tech-savvy people (or nerds).
7. You are a brand. Yeah, you!
As a blogger it is your personality that will win people over and often make the difference in which blog they choose to follow. No matter what you do online, and no matter where you do it, keep in mind that you are representing your blog and your brand. Treat yourself like something of a celebrity and keep in mind the image you want to project. It will help in the long run.
8. Twitter hashtags are simple, but not that simple.
A lot of people use hashtags on Twitter as if they were WordPress tags on blog posts, but this isn’t always going to get you the best result. If nobody else is interested in the tags you choose then nobody is going to see them at all, so make sure you always do a search for similar tags until you find a popular one.
9. Treat your best content like the whole shebang.
Very often people will promote all of their content in exactly the same way, which is a mistake. To be honest, many blog posts don’t have to be linked to with social media at all, and are only of interest to those who already read your blog. When you have something really good though, go all out with it. Promote it everywhere, as if that one blog post is a book you just got published. If you put extra effort into your best work people are going to have a better impression of the level of quality you bring.10. Adapt to what people respond to.
The most important thing you can ever learn about managing a successful website is this right here, because this is learning how to learn, and once again not enough people do it. If you write a very successful post that gets a lot of attention, you would be making a tremendous mistake not to at least follow it up. Beyond that, ask yourself why it was successful and what people really connected with, what they had to say about it, and then appeal to those groups of people with future posts.
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