In 2016, if you want to have any chance whatsoever of getting your blog off the ground you need a social presence, a strong social presence and you’re not going to achieve that without social marketing. Sure, if you get masses of traffic you may leak some of it to your social channels but the reality is building a social media audience is much easier if your traffic is derived from social media itself. With that said, there are a lot of things you can do to your blog in order to gear it up for social exposure and there are also a lot of things you can be doing on the networks themselves in order to give your blog its best chance of success. This article is going to cover the basics. We’re going to discuss what your blog needs in terms of content, how to present it and how to get started in getting the word out about such content via your social channels. Hopefully you’ll find this a lot easier than you thought it would be!
Keep Blogging – Content Is King
Now matter how good you are at social search marketing you’re not going to do it without good content and you’re not going to create good content time and time again. Not everything is going to be a success so you’ll need a degree of trial and error. To find that one viral article, you might need to write 10, you might need to write 100 – nobody really knows so you need to keep plugging away until something sticks.
Use Twitter Cards
You can find more information on twitter cards here on dev.twitter.com – they’re a great way to get your content out on twitter as they provide little textual (and image) previews of your blog post direct on twitter which makes the link to your post extremely enticing to anyone coming across it on the social network. It’s only a few lines of code so I’d advise any blog who doesn’t have them to seriously consider it.
Plaster It with Share Buttons
If you’re not trying to get your content shared you’re not going to be a success. Any content you get eyes on you need to try and turn it into a further share. If every visitor shared your site/blog post and each of those got 10 sets of eyes on it and they shared it… Well, you can do the math. You need to have your sharing buttons prominent, before and after the content and even in between it if it warrants it. Try your utmost to get your content shared and you’ll be rewarded. Of course if you want to encourage shares, your content must be up to scratch. If it’s not you’re going to be wasting your time as no matter how many share buttons you have if it’s awful it’s awful, nobody will share it.
Allow Visitors to Follow You
You should always have prominent links to your social channels both in the header and footer of your site. Both Facebook and Twitter offer great plugins/snippets to allow this with ease – even if you have no coding knowledge. Make use of this, if you can turn 10% of your unique visitors each day into a follower on Twitter or a like on Facebook you’ll grow your audience in no time. The bigger your audience, the more immediate shares you’ll get once you put a content piece out there and then that will generate more shares, more traffic and more new followers – it snowballs extremely quickly but you have to be in it to win it!
Tweet / Update Regularly
People love regularity, your blog and your social outputs should be frequent but not too frequent as to appear spammy. Posting daily and tweeting a few times a day is adequate but think quality over quantity – you don’t want to be losing followers as quickly as you acquire them.
Schedule Your Tweets
Keep in mind the Internet is 24/7, 365! Your audience is not only going to be viewing your site during the few hours a day you’re at the computer. If you’ve got lots of tweets to put out in your working day then be sure to schedule them throughout the day – especially if you have a global audience.
Follow / Comment on Like Minded Bloggers
Like minded bloggers are holding your potential audience for you until you can reach them. This is the way you need to look at it. Their audience is what your audience will be made up of so you need to get your hooks into them. Comment on their posts, posts follow ups to their posts, comment on their tweets/fb updates, comment, comment, comment, make sure their audience associate your name with the third party they’re following. In short, steal their audience and make it your own.
If you follow the above you’ll most definitely be rewarded for your efforts in terms of social growth but the key is the content. They say content is king and it’s never more true than in social marketing. Poor content is a huge turn off so if you truly want to make your blog a success, concentrate on your content and then apply the above – you won’t go far wrong.
