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.

Twitter

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.

Facebook

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.

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PlanetBizOp.com

->Steven

Updated: Originally published November 7th 2018