Your job doesn’t end when you hit publish. You still have to invest a good half hour into promoting your content on the internet.
More than 2.5 million blog posts are published each day, and the social media posts that you create to promote them give you limited visibility. You need a full fledged social media sharing routine to reach and impact a good portion of your social media audience.
Before you get to sharing, it is important to ensure that you have optimize your blog post for search. You should have:
- Used your keyword at least four times every 500 words, at least once in the introductory paragraph and headers (H1, H2 and H3), in the permalink and in the image Alt text
- Filled-in your meta-title, description and keywords
- Used synonyms and variants of your keywords on the post
If you have SEO covered, you can then focus on sharing your post on social networks and alternative sites.
1. Research your hashtags
Hashtags can help you expand your reach on Twitter and Facebook, and help you target people interested in your content. Many times, the keywords that you have included on your post differ from trending hashtags, so you need to conduct research to identify them.
You can manually find your hashtags by entering probable ones in Twitter’s search bar and choosing the most relevant alternative that appears in the drop-down box.
You could skip this process and use a hashtag research tool like Keyhole to identify the best hashtags to use.
2. Share not schedule
Ideally, at least your first share should be just that – a share and not a scheduled post, so you can respond to the first few people who interact with your share.
It is also useful to type in a simple description that isn’t the title of your post so it seems genuine and not automated. You can do this directly from your blog if you have a social media share plugin like SumoMe installed.
3. Setup tweets with @mentions
Your first set of tweets should be directed at the bloggers and brands you have mentioned on your post.
Next, you can section your blog post into pieces of tips, insights, ideas or important facts that you want to share with your audience. Every highlight can be turned into a tweet with a link leading back to your article.
Treat these tweets as slugs that need to get people to read more, and only turn the most interesting pieces of information into sectioned tweets. You can schedule the tweets using a social media management app like DrumUp and store some of them in a library to reuse at a later date.
Many bloggers have claimed that bringing popular content back gets them even more shares and visibility.
4. Share on LinkedIn groups
Join a bunch of LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your niche. Once you have published your blog post, share it on relevant LinkedIn groups.
If you have SumoMe installed, you can very conveniently perform this exercise from your blog pages.
It is advised to have separate descriptions for each group you share to, taking into account their unique communities and members. Most posts that do well directly address group members and provide them with a context for the post.
5. Use Facebook and Google Plus tags
Tag people you have mentioned if you are connected to them on Facebook and Google Plus. You can get influencers to notice you and build great relationships with bloggers and potential partners by regularly interacting with and tagging/mentioning them on social media posts.
It is a good idea to also tag people you have mentioned on these two social networks, because Twitter mentions can be lost if you have @mentioned someone who typically gets tons of notifications.
6. Promote your post on alternative platforms
There are several alternative platforms that allow you to promote your content. For instance, you can rewrite and share/ syndicate your blog posts on platforms like LinkedIn Pulse, Medium and Inbound.org with a link leading back to the complete article.
This can act as a great way to redirect existing traffic on these platforms back to your blog.
There are also other platforms like Scoop.it and ViralContentBee where you can earn your content more visibility. Scoop.it lets you syndicate content and ViralContentBee encourages other users to share your content in exchange for you sharing theirs.
7. Reshare all the shares that your post gets
One way to encourage the people who promote your post is by sharing their shares and helping them get more engagement.
You can add your website as a keyword to monitor on TweetDeck or a social media monitoring tool like BrandWatch to catch all mentions and interact with them instantly and push people to share your content more.
8. Turn your blog post into a SlideShare
Some SlideShares get as many as 50,000 views or more, and the slide clipping feature lets viewers clip your slide and use it elsewhere, earning you even more visibility.
Ensure that you add your brand’s logo on each slide and add graphs or other useful visuals to make your share more interactive. SlideShare also lets you optimize for search by adding keywords and automatically transcribing the content in your slides.
9. Turn your blog post into an infographic
Infographics receive 3X more engagement on social networks as any other content format, according to a study by MassPlanner.
It isn’t very hard to turn your blog post into an infographic. You don’t have to start from scratch. You can use templates available on a infographic design tool like Venngage to quickly turn your blog post into an infographic.
Once you have created your infographic, you can share it on social media, upload it on infographic directories, add it to email newsletters and send email notifications to bloggers who may be interested in sharing your infographic on their blog.
Feature Image via Freepik.com