Get ‘Em Hooked: Why and How to Promote Your Blog on Social Media
Blogs used to be the sole domain of soapboxy individuals speaking on behalf of no-one but themselves. But the blogscape is changing. Nowadays, with the rise of content marketing, blogging has become a vital piece of many businesses’ marketing strategy—and with good reason. Websites with blogs average 97% more inbound links (i.e., links to your site) than blog-free sites. In other words, having a blog will make your website rank higher in Google’s search results.
But it’s as good as useless if nobody knows about it. And the best way to spread the word? Social media, hands down. By social media we mean Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the scores of other networks that have made the internet a social space.
We recommend taking a “hub-and-hook” approach:
- Hub: Your website, of which your blog is a part, is the hub, the focal point of the operation where your sales and conversions happen.
- Hook: Social media is the hook, the way to reel in interested users to your site.
It’s a straightforward process:
- Set up a blog (if you’re a Rocketspark customer, you already have one)
- Write tiptop blog content that lives at the hub
- Send out a link to that blog post over social media
1-2-3. It’s not complicated—but it is effective.
Why you should promote your blog on social media
Let’s say you’ve written an outstanding blog post: a riveting topic thoroughly researched, cleverly written and supremely relevant to your customers. It goes live, ready for your clientele to lap up and…
Tumbleweed.
Nobody sees it. All that hard work down the drain. That was the experience of photographer Victor Alexeyev, one of our clients, when he recently started blogging. His usual number of blog post views could be counted on two hands. Great content that nobody sees. So Victor changed tack and shared his most recent blog post (February 25) on Facebook. Look what happened…
Admittedly, the numbers either side of this spike in traffic aren’t massive—that’s because Victor’s just starting out and building some momentum. But what is massive is the increase in traffic to his blog: from averaging around 10 visits a day to 134 overnight. That’s not all though; you can see the next day was almost as high and for four days afterwards he’s still seeing higher than normal traffic.
And here’s the thing: it doesn’t cost you a thing. Social media is a marketing freebie. Perhaps even more importantly, it doesn’t even cost you extra time—well, not much. Posting or tweeting a link to your blog can be done in just a couple of minutes. You’ve already done the hard yards writing the blog post; you may as well get the most of out of your masterpiece by spreading the word. One minute and zero dollars later, your blog is out there on social media, doing its job of hooking your followers to your hub.
How to promote your blog on social media
The only catch to all this is that you need a following on social media. Victor already had a strong following on Facebook, which means there was a ready-made audience to see the blog link. If your business hasn’t yet begun to harness the power of social media marketing, now is the time to get started. (Lucky for you, we’ve written a beginner’s guide for businesses getting started on social media.)
To get even more mileage out of your blog, share your blog post multiple times on your social media platforms. Why? Because when you share a link over social media it’s only a matter of time—we’re talking minutes—before it’ll be buried on your followers’ feeds by more recent posts. In other words, only a fraction of your followers will see it. Multiply the number of times you share it and you multiply the number who see it (and hopefully visit your blog). It’s simple maths.
But won’t that annoy my followers who do see it several times? I’m glad you asked. Potentially, yes. ExactTarget discovered that 38% of Facebook and 52% of Twitter users had un-liked/un-followed a business for being “boring or repetitive”. But you can easily avoid turning your followers off. The key is that ol’ spice of life, variety. Alter the wording of your social media posts. Change the accompanying images. Highlight different parts of the content. (Buffer have an excellent in-depth rundown on how to keep multiple-posting fresh.) And be sensitive to the differences between different types of social media. Your tweets, where every character counts, will be different to your Facebook posts.
Conclusion: hook ‘em in
If you’re blogging for your business, GREAT! But don’t stop there. By taking the extra minute or two to share the link to that blog post over Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, you’re increasing the visibility and probable traffic to your blog, big time. Your blog forms part of the hub. Social media is the hook.
