In the previous post, we discussed some of the most effective content promotion strategies to help you increase the traffic to your blog.
Here are 15 more strategies, most of which are based on social media:
Content Promotion Strategies: Social Media
Social media is the perfect channel for promoting content, and yet most marketers don’t take full advantage of its many benefits.
Use the tips outlined below to get your content seen by a larger audience:
Tip #1: Interlink All Your Social Profiles
The first thing you need to do when it comes to promoting your content on social media is to create a spiderweb of interconnected properties.
A lot of marketers have numerous social profiles but not enough optimization.
They create social profiles and immediately begin sharing content on them without taking the time to give followers on that network access to their other platforms.
You need to think of the social profiles that you own as the intersections of a spiderweb, with each one giving exposure to all the other places where you can be found.
For instance:
- Mention your business’s YouTube channel on your podcast once in a while
- Use your YouTube channel to encourage engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and everywhere else you’re most active
- Your social profile’s ‘About’ section should link to all your other profiles
Tip #2: Connect With Ten Or More New People In Your Industry Every Day
Whether they are customers, readers, fans, or influencers – it’s important that you plant these seeds in your industry.
By connecting on a deeper level with people, you will discover a lot of valuable information that can help you make better decisions such as the types of content that people in your industry generally resonate with, the problems that most are struggling with, the products they love or hate, and a lot more.
When you do this every day, in time, your efforts will start to compound as you acquire ‘true fans’ who will start doing your marketing for you.
Tip #3: Share Your Blog Posts More Than Once
Even those of your readers who are the most engaged are going to miss some of your posts simply because they were not active during the time that you shared it.
Increase traffic to your articles by following a schedule like this:
- Publication: Share to all your social media platforms once
- Day of Publication: You can share it a few more times on specific platforms and test the different headlines from your post
- Next Day, Week, or Month: You can share your article at least three more times (possibly even more) depending on its seasonality
When you do this, you’re giving every member of your audience a chance to see your content while promoting it in different ways (varying headlines, quotes, factoids, and so on)
Tip #4: Share More Than Just The Headline
A lot of marketers simply share the headline of their post on their platforms and think that they’re done with the promotion of that article on social media.
While there’s nothing wrong with that, when you do it that way, you miss out on a lot of benefits that social media promotion provides. Try sharing sections of your posts, and see how your readers respond.
For instance, you could share:
- Quotes: Pick some of the most notable or curiosity-inducing statistics, facts, or quotes from your article to share on social media
- Key Takeaways: Share the most important lessons from your article
- Subsections: Share specific subsections of your article that may resonate with various audience segments
Tip #5: Re-Share Your Best Content Constantly
Your best-performing content shouldn’t be relegated to the deepest, darkest parts of your archives.
If there’s a piece of content on your blog that performs well during specific times of the year, or with specific audiences, then schedule it for re-sharing at appropriate times.
In every industry, there are new people entering all the time, which means that an ‘old’ article from months or years ago could perform even better when shared at a later time or with another audience.
Tip #6: Make Your Headlines Emotional To Really Connect With People
The headlines you craft should not only get clicked, but you want them to get shares as well. And the best way to do that is by pulling at your audience’s emotions. The majority of people share content for emotional reasons.
Some reasons include:
- Feeling like they are part of something that is greater
- Maintaining relationships
- Supporting Causes
- Defining their beliefs and identity
- Informing others
- Swaying the opinions of friends and family
If your headlines can tap into at least one of these emotional drivers, then your content will get shared often.
Tip #7: Thank Everyone Who Promotes Your Content
Send personalized thank you’s to all the people who re-share your articles.
This tactic ties in with the one about connecting with at least ten people every day, and it’s also a great way of building true fans within your audience.
They will be flattered you reached out simply to thank them, and be more likely to share more of your stuff in the future.
This social network is a powerhouse when it comes to effective content promotion.
Tip #8: Test and Measure Your Tweets At Various Times During The Day
Engagement on Twitter fluctuates throughout the day, which means that you have to test what’s going to work for you.
The most likely time based on your core audience’s most popular time zones is between 10 am and 7 pm, but you have to test and track it to know for sure.
Twitter Analytics will help you determine your tweets and times that are most engaging.
Tip #9: Don’t Overuse Hashtags
A couple of hashtags for each post are great for highlighting your content to those people who are searching for it on Twitter.
It can also help you join conversations on topics that are trending, but adding too many hashtags can make your tweets hard to read.
After all, you only have 140 characters to work with, so make better use of your space.
Tip #10: Use Different Article Titles
You can get a lot of useful data from Twitter about the number of users who interacted with your tweets.
Make use of this information to try out various article titles. Post the same link in two tweets a day apart, but use different titles on each of them and track the number of clicks that each post gets.
Then you can start to hone in on the sort of titles that your audience engages with.
Tip #11: Pay For Exposure
This is something that most marketers who are just starting out don’t want to hear, but the truth is that if you want to boost visibility then you must use the promoted tweet feature offered by Twitter.
It costs very little to make sure that your posts appear right at the top of targeted groups of users.
Although this doesn’t guarantee engagement, it does mean that people will get to see the content you are putting out. Just remember to always track and measure engagement on those tweets to ensure that you are getting the best ROI.
This social network is among the largest communities on the planet, and it’s obviously a great idea to promote your content on Facebook. Use the following tactics to get more traffic to your site:
Tip #12: Test And Measure Different Posting Times
Just as with Twitter, it is vital to try out your posts at different hours during the day to see the sort of reaction that you get. Systematically mix things up and notice what happens.
You’ll soon be able to hone in on the times that have the most engagement from your audience.
Tip #13: Give Them What They Want
Your readers aren’t necessarily on Facebook just to read your long pieces of content or to take any kind of decisive action. They are mostly there to be distracted and entertained.
This means that you need to make sure that you are giving that to them if you want them to stay engaged.
You can do this either through funny posts, good discussions or by giving them links to other interesting content – even if it’s not your own.
Tip #14: Start Your Own Facebook Group
Creating your own Facebook group is a great idea as it provides you with an effective way of connecting with a loyal, engaged segment of your readers. These are the people who are most interested in the content you produce, and in connecting with you.
If you don’t have a Facebook group already, it’s time you created one.
If you have one already, then make sure that the content you’re sharing with your group is new with a high-touch approach. Focus more on what inspired you to create the content, and mention some of the people that your content would help and why.
Ask for feedback, questions, and suggestions from your group members.
Tip #15: Boost Your Best-Performing Posts
Even if you create the best and most engaging posts on Facebook, there’s still that element of randomness when it comes to who sees your content.
The best thing to do with your more successful posts is to boost them to a much larger audience.
If your Website Custom Audience is set up, you can boost your best posts to the people who visited your blog in the past X days.
This provides you with the opportunity to re-engage old readers and maybe even get their emails and convince them to share your content.
Content Promotion – The Bottom Line
As you can see, there is a lot of things you can do on social media platforms to help get your content seen by the most people in your networks.
These two platforms mentioned here are just examples, but all platforms come with their own unique benefits.
For instance, on Pinterest, you could use an automated tool to schedule your pins for up to 20 times a day as it plays by somewhat different rules than the other social sites.
You can also enhance your content promotion tactics by using rich pins and fleshing out your pin descriptions with a bit of creative copy writing that entices people to click.
Other tips for Pinterest include getting on Group Boards and also making images on your blog pinnable.
A lot of bloggers don’t bother optimizing their images for this site, which means that they are missing out on a lot of free traffic.
Bonus Tips:
- Identify top sharers in your industry and reach out to them to share your content
- Interview some of the top players in your industry for your blog
- Mention the big players in your content and link out to their sites
- Build a guest posting system that is solid and consistent
- Use retargeting – A Lot!
- Use Recommended Content Ads where you place your content on relevant blogs
- Try Reddit ads
- Syndicate your content as much as you can to help get traffic flowing to a new blog
- Turn your videos into various other forms of content (eg, transcripts, podcasts, images for social media, etc.)
In Conclusion
In this and the previous post, we’ve covered A LOT of content promotion strategies.
While this isn’t anywhere near a comprehensive list of all the different ways there are to get your content seen, it still does provide you with everything you need to get more traffic flowing to your blog whether you’re just getting started online or you’ve been at it for a while.
But this doesn’t mean that you have to try and do all of them at once.
In fact, you only need to pick a few of these tactics to implement in your business.
The methods that you choose are going to be dependent on factors such as your:
- Industry
- Experience
- Creativity
- Budget
- And other factors
You can mix, match and combine methods that you feel are going to give you the best return on your investment of either time or money.
While choosing, ask yourself which of the methods outlined in these posts will be effective in moving the needle for your blog right now.
If you’re only getting about 50 visitors a month, you don’t want to start with 50,000/month strategies.
Conversely, if you’re getting 20,000 monthly visitors, there’s really no point in picking tactics that will deliver only 50 or so visitors a month.
You know where your blog is, traffic-wise, and so you can determine what’s attainable for you and then focus on those tactics relentlessly until you get to a point where they’re not making a dent in the particular metrics that you’re trying to grow.
Feel free to post your comment below. An email address is required but it will not be shared with anyone, put on any list, or used for any kind of marketing, just to alert you if there are any replies. Thanks and happy hunting!
PlanetBizOp.com
->Steven
Updated: Originally published November 7th 2018
Steven,
I really appreciate this article as it has many knowledge bombs about SEO, which for anyone is really helpful. Not only that, but these tips that you share are incredibly easy to implement and i’ll definitely take them into consideration when i craft my net post for my online business, since traffic is hard to come by for me at the moment.
All the best,
– William
Keep at it! The traffic will come in time. I’m happy you got some useful information from the post.
Thanks for the comment William!
Great article Steven! I really think that content promotion is very important for our business and it can greatly help how our website ranks in search engines. I am using Facebook for now and I can say that it is not bad at all. I want to ask you about Pinterest? Do you think that it is good source of free traffic and is it worth doing on it?
Pinterest is a kind of graphical search engine. If you like creating graphics for your posts, you’ll do well there. It can be an excellent source of traffic, if you put in the time to create the graphics for your pins.
Thanks for the comment Daniel!
Social media in our time has become very important for all businesses. It helps us drive traffic, sales and get our stories out their to the world. It shows you took your time to thoroughly plan out each bulletin with good tip titles which is great because I love seeing articles organized since it helps the reader, especially beginners. All your tips are great and it just reminded me I really should do them to update my own blog.
I’m happy to hear the article was useful to you.
Thanks for the comment Roseberry!
HI Steven,
Thanks for the in depth article. You have shared a wealth of information, and I will have to re-read this a few times to sort out the strategies that are going to fit my needs. I am not a social media expert at all, so this will be put to good use!
It seems that this type of depth would take quite a bit of time for me, are there any ways to cut the time down. For instance, engaging with ten people a day, sounds like a hour right there. I guess the trick is to learn to incorporate several things at once, maybe? Like share a blog post with ten people? Would that be one way of doing it?
I am not on twitter or Pinterest as of yet, but I intend to include that soon. I want to do a business site on Pinterest, would it be advised to open a business site on twitter as well, instead of a personal twitter account? Or is that not recommended?
I did like the idea of eventually automating somewhat on Pinterest, that would definitely help me in the future. You have so much, I can’t comment on it all! This is a great blog that will be of enormous help to me in the future.
Thanks Steven, I have your site bookmarked!!
Chas
I would pick just a couple platforms to focus on. Social Media can use up a lot of time compared to the return. It is all designed to get you to pay to promote, so in its free form, it is of limited value.
You should create business type accounts to promote your business instead of personal where possible.
Thanks for the comment Chas!
Great post with very helpful tips. Social media is a popular way to drive traffic for your blog or website. There are other social media platforms out there as well like Reddit, Tumblr, Google Plus etc but I think we need to find out first where our website or blog’s traffic is, there’s no point investing time into Facebook, for example, when your ideal customer isn’t active there. One important thing I would like to add here, all social media profiles should be interesting as well. Thanks for the very useful blog post.
True, it pays to put a little effort into your profile. I also agree you should pick and choose a few platforms to focus on, social media can be a big time waster otherwise.
Thanks for the comment Bushra!
Hi Steven,
Wow, you did some wonderful job in this post. Your 15 actionable strategies for driving more traffic to our blog. Your post was full of value and I’m glad i came across it today. I have been using social media all this while but I never knew that there so many ways in which I’m missing out on how I can effectively use it to drive some good traffic to my blog.
For instance, I never though about the need to do internal linking of my social account and even connecting with people who’re already in my industry. That is a very good idea. A nice way of getting more information from those who’re already expert in the online marketing.
I also appreciate your advice on sharing our post more than just once. I think that really make sense since doing so helps your content to reach more people out there. And finally one more thing I want to apply from your bonus tips is reaching out to to sharers in the industry and letting them help me in promoting my content.
I must say for sure that I have learned so much from this post that I plan to apply them all. In order not to forget some of the tips you shared, I have Bookmarked your post for future reference.
Thanks so much for sharing this useful information with us.
Stephen.
I’m glad you got so much from the article.
Thanks for the comment Stephen!