Social Media is perhaps the greatest tool a blogger has for exponentially increasing their audience and viewership.
Unfortunately, keeping up with the ever-increasing number of social media sites can be daunting.
While every social media platform has the potential to increase your viewership, it doesn’t make sense to spend time using all of them.
The more time spent on social media sites means less time actually spent writing and creating amazing posts.
A blogger’s first directive is to blog.
After all, fresh content and proactive writing is the key to keeping followers and gaining even more.
Here, bloggers will obtain the knowledge needed to effectively use important social media platforms and learn how to create a blog that can successfully maximizes these platforms.
Table Of Contents
Determine The Target Audience
Identifying the target blog readers will help in recognizing the most important social media sites.
Bloggers do not need to waste their time with social media sites that are known not to cater to their particular audience.
For example, audiences on LinkedIn will be far more interested in career information, while bloggers wishing to attract audiences who like do-it-yourself information will benefit from focusing attention to Pinterest.
Helpful questions to ask are:
- How old are my readers? Instagram users are typically younger, while Google+ users are usually older professionals.
- Are my viewers more visually oriented? This could also determine how bloggers present their content. If better viewership potential is found on Pinterest and Facebook, then the content should be more visually oriented.
- Is my content professional or personal? Again, this will separate the LinkedIn world from the Facebook world and so on.
Calculate Potential Traffic
Understanding which sites will maximize viewership is important.
While LinkedIn and Pinterest represent easily categorized sites for the audience bloggers want, they should not stop there.
It is reasonable to assume that users on these two sites probably have Facebook and Twitter accounts as well.
Facebook and Twitter are two critical sites for maximizing your target readers.
No matter what topic a blogger specializes in, these sites are almost certainly guaranteed to have their target audience.
As discussed above, cultivating quality communities on social media can be time consuming.
More importantly, consuming time which bloggers need to generate new content on their blog in the first place.
Fortunately, there are tools that allow bloggers to automate the dissemination of content on multiple platforms at once.
Here are a few tools beneficial for sharing content:
Buffer:
This site is geared to toward marketing agencies but is great for anyone trying to share content on several social media platforms at once.
Buffer works by allowing bloggers build up a queue of content to be posted on social media sites at a later time.
This service is free, but requires an upgrade to a paid version for total access.
Jetpack for WordPress:
This tool is specifically for blogs on WordPress and allows bloggers to share content in real time when they publish new content on WordPress.
Dlvr.it:
Short for ‘deliver it’, this site is comparable to Jetpack, but is not limited to WordPress blogs.
What separates dlvr.it from the rest is it allows bloggers to share up to five different feeds.
This means bloggers who have multiple blogs can share those as well.
It even allows users to share another blogger’s content.
Users are allowed three social media sites for dissemination as well as five feeds.
Repost Previous Content
Reposting content allows bloggers to increase the value of their content.
Bloggers whose topics are timeless in nature (meaning the content is not solely for current events) will benefit from reposting their content.
Reposting may snag newer readers who ultimately turn into followers.
Bloggers should keep a list of important blogs that are worthy of repost.
Depending on their content, they could be consistently refreshed.
Start Sharing And Watch It Grow
Social media is an absolute must for bloggers to generate content and establish loyal followers.
Competitively speaking, blogging without considering sharing that content on social media is essentially a nonstarter.
Most readers have come to expect being able to go to one place to find all of their content and social media companies have worked hard to see they stay on those sites.
Having said that, even loyal followers will only be motivated to go as far as Facebook or LinkedIn to see blog content.
Thankfully, with automated sharing and the wisdom to know which sites to cultivate over others, bloggers can easily promote their content more than ever.
Sources:
The Complete Guide to Building Your Blog Audience.
Jetpack: Publicize.
Buffer.
Dlvr.it: Share Better.
How to Start a Blog Online.