3 Ways to Promote a Blog via Social Media
People and organizations have a wide range of potential goals when starting and publishing blogs. Some wish to use blogs as a means of providing valuable content to audience members who may theoretically become customers of their businesses. Some use blogs to offer advice to others. Some blog simply because they want to vent. For more information about blogging tactics in general, check out The Blog Starter.
Regardless, most bloggers do share one common goal: growing their audiences.
There are many ways you can help your blog attract readers. Naturally, the most important step you can take is to regularly publish quality content. However, it’s also important to leverage the power of social media.
A proper social media strategy can play a critical role in helping your blog grow its audience. To effectively promote a blog via social media, keep the following tips in mind:
Define Your Target Audience
Before you start promoting your blog on social media, take the time to define (in as much detail as possible) who your target readers are. What’s their age range? Are they more likely to be of a particular gender? What are their interests and hobbies?
Defining your target reader is important because it will help you write blog entries that are more likely to appeal to them. In regard to how defining your target reader will improve your social media marketing efforts, it’s important to understand that many social media platforms allow users who run ads on them to make certain specifications about which types of users will see those ads. For example, with Facebook’s audience targeting features, you can ensure ads promoting your blog are only seen by users within a certain age range, geographical area, etc. This allows you to optimize your budget if you plan on marketing your blog by publishing ads.
Re-post Blog Entries
Running ads isn’t the only way you can use social media to help a blog’s audience grow. You should also maintain accounts for your blog and share your entries with your followers.
However, some people make the mistake of assuming that they only need to share their entries on their social media accounts once to effectively promote them. Don’t make this mistake! When you share an entry once, there is a good chance a large number of your followers will miss the post for a number of potential reasons. Additionally, you will ideally accumulate more followers as you continue marketing your blog on social media. You want to ensure they also have the opportunity to see blog posts you may have shared before they followed your accounts.
Make a point of revisiting old blog posts that you haven’t shared in some time. Consider sharing them again for more exposure.
Monitor Hashtags
Although trending hashtags are most commonly used on Twitter, they are also somewhat popular on Facebook and Instagram. Monitor which hashtags are trending on a consistent basis.
There will be times when you may find trending hashtags that relate in some capacity to your blog posts. You can leverage the popularity of these hashtags to grow your audience by reposting old blog entries and including the hashtags in your posts.
All that said, you should also remember that social media marketing can be very effective, but it can also be tricky. You need to regularly experiment with various approaches to develop your skills. If you do, however, you’ll learn just how powerful a tool social media can be when you’re growing a blog’s audience.
