5 Ways to promote your Blog with social media

Social media marketing is one of the most widely applied techniques through which you can interact, share and acquire knowledge on various issues and topics. You can also promote your content and offers on social media, hence it is a helpful way in building your brand image. Social media marketing and optimization involves direct planning and strategy layout with the help of websites that will avail good popularity and ranking in the social sites as well as search engines. 

In this article we look at some of the effective ways of promoting your website/blog with the help of social media networks as discussed below:

Integrate social sharing buttons on your blog/website

This is the first thing you should do before you can start promoting your content on social sites. Your visitors should have an easy way of sharing your content. The share buttons should be placed in an area where they are easily visible to anyone.  There are several plugins that give you good share buttons. I use Shareaholic on my site, and this has enabled me to grow my blog in greater ways than before.

Use social networks

There are a number of social media networks, you need to focus on those that bring in the best results. Focusing on a few, gives you time to create good content and promote it as well. When selecting a social network you also need consider the target audience i.e.  what most of your readers prefer to use as their social network. If you write on Career related topics, then LinkedIn will be a good site to promote your content.  The commonly used networks include:

• Facebook
• Pinterest
• Google +
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Youtube

I personally focus on Facebook and Pinterest. This is where most of my blog traffic comes from. I use the others but not to a big extent.

Facebook offers different ways to post your content:

• Link posts
• Post with images
• Video/rich media posts

Visual component and layout are key aspects of the Facebook usage. Having a Facebook Fan page, helps you build your brand image by posting high quality content and engaging your audience on day-to-day basis. Joining groups in your niche and actively participating in group’s activities as you share your content, is a great way to build a good, reliable audience for your blog.

You can also read:

• Content Marketing Mistakes you should avoid as a blogger
• Content Promotional Communities

Use social media management tools

Social media management tools makes it possible to manage your social media accounts with ease. They have automation capability which makes it easy to schedule posts for future dates hence saving on time and effort. They also offer analytics to enable you better understand your content performance.  All you need to do is schedule given tasks and leave the tool to work for you. Some of the best tools include:

• Hootsuite
• Sproutsocial

For a full list of social media management tools, you can read: Social Media Management Tools.

Use social bookmarking sites

Social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Digg etc. enables you to bookmark your blog posts. The advantage of this, is that your blog posts may be visible for many years which does not happen with sites like Facebook, where the lifetime of posts is very short ( hours or just even minutes). Some of these bookmarking sites, have an up vote option, which can put your post on the front/top pages. When your post appears on the top page, you have an opportunity to benefit from higher visibility hence more visitors to your blog. Please note, when you join these bookmarking sites, be active, contribute then share blog posts once in a while, this way you will not be viewed as a someone who shares spam content.

Related Article: Creating a successful social media marketing plan, what you need to know

Use paid social media advertising

Paid advertising is one other way to reach more audience on the social networks, without having to put in much effort.  Best sites to do paid advertising are: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. Make sure you try your best to target your promotion to your desired audience. You can do these basing on Age, Demographics among other factors. Doing this, will ensure you get the value for your advertising money.

The bottom line

Building an audience on social media is a long process, that takes time and effort on your part. Try your best to strategize and plan on how to market your content on social media. With a good plan that is followed with action, you will see good results.