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Promoting Your Blog Using Social Media

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Social media marketing is a great way to promote your blog or your business. Many business owners and bloggers consider it a bit of a chore and a very time-consuming way to undertake marketing — it doesn’t necessarily bring fast results.

Social media marketing tends to be something of a long game and it’s more about communicating with your audience and interacting with them — it’s primarily about building a relationship with your blog followers.

Social media is not about selling, so pushy sales tactics are very much frowned upon — you will understand this if you write a blog. Blogging is similarly the wrong media to be giving people the ‘hard sell’ and it is more about communicating, so social media is a natural extension of blogging – actually Twitter is a good method of micro-blogging and if you get into the habit of posting on Twitter regularly it is a great way to extend your blog. You can effectively grab people’s attention with a micro-blog and direct them to your main blog for further information.

What should you post?

The best way to post on social media is to give little teasers that will get people to look at your main blog site. Use snippets of information from your previous or current blogs that will get people intrigued enough to want to know more. You could use questions that will be answered in your blog or a short statement such as, ‘If you want to know how to soothe your crying baby, there are lots of tips on my blog.com’.

Try to post something that will get people interacting with you — ask for their opinions and comments and try to get a dialogue going between your followers.

Don’t forget that your interaction is extremely important and you should reply to other people’s posts as soon as you can — even if it’s just to say thank you for their comments. When you interact with others in this way, you will be seen as a real person, not just a business or an entity that is trying to sell an idea, a product or service. Make your communication as genuine as possible.

Social media sites are a great platform for showcasing your expertise and demonstrating your credibility.

Whether people comment or not, they are being exposed to your ideas and this can help to make a connection and get people interested in finding out more from your blog. Use the opportunity to give advice, information and links to other people and organizations that can help to build up your reputation.

Don’t be afraid to discuss important or controversial issues and get people talking. Social media is a very fast way to get information out to a lot of people and you can use this to your advantage by telling your fans and followers about developments, issues and news before your competitors.

Find out what people need and what they want from your blog using social media — don’t be afraid to ask questions because once you know what your audience is looking for, you can provide it with your blog. It’s also a great way to reassure people and convince them that your blog is exactly what they’ve been searching for.

Keep an eye on the competition

The best way to get a feel for social media promoting is to see how others promote their blogs and businesses. Watch how others post on their Facebook fan page, Twitter and other social media sites and pay attention to the types of posts that get the most liked. Watch for comments from their fans as this will show you the type of thing that attracts attention. Notice which tweets are re-tweeted most frequently on Twitter and get a feel for the type of blogs and businesses that have the largest following then try to emulate what they are doing.

Where to post

There are many social media sites now and every day there seems to be a new one popping up, so where should you focus your attention? Millions of people every day use Facebook and Twitter, and these are a must.

You should also consider Google+ as this promises to be a popular site and is growing very rapidly. Here are some details about these main sites.

Facebook: this is considered the top site with over 850 million users, although with changes happening so quickly in social media, Facebook could be superseded by another site in the future. For the time being, it is the most popular and a great place to post information, photographs, video links and especially links to your blog.

Twitter: this is another growing site with over 200 million users. It’s a great site for micro-blogging and getting people onto your main blog with snippets of information.

Linkedin: Great for connecting with other businesses and professionals with over 150 million users.

You Tube: with around 300 million users, this is a great site for showing and sharing videos. They can be fun, educational or commercial and you can also post them on your blogs and social media sites. People are increasingly demanding videos and interactive media rather than plain boring text, so get filming!

Google+: one of the newer sites but already has around 65 million users. It’s been said that it attracts the more technical types but it looks set to become a very popular social media platform.

However there are plenty of other sites to consider, such as Pinterest for sharing pictures (10 million users), Stumbleupon for sharing interesting websites (20 million users) and Ecademy for business owners (17 million users). Here is a list of some of the more popular sites:

Facebook: www.facebook.com

Twitter: www.twitter.com

Google+: https://plus.google.com

Linkedin: www.linkedin.com

You Tube: www.youtube.com

Pinterest: www.pinterest.com

StumbleUpon: www.stumbleupon.com

The main criteria is that you focus on sites that attract the type of people you want to read your blog. There wouldn’t be time to post on every social media site, so you have to be choosy and concentrate on the ones that are likely to be most productive for your blog or business.

Image © arrow – Fotolia.com

About

David Anderson is a business coach, mentor and expert in making money. With over 30 years experience building and running startups and large corporations, David has a successful history in building wealth and success. Learn more about his proprietary system for building wealth – Wealthopedia – at davidandersonwealth.com.

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{ 23 Responses }

  1. Sudipto says:
    Hey David, Nice post and Yes, social networking sites are the best to promote any blog and its also helps to drive more traffic to our blog. Thanks for sharing this post.
  2. Bob says:
    Thank you so much for this overview. I am new to the social media, especially things like Google+
  3. Malik says:
    Ya of course social media is widely used to drive traffic to blog. Promoting the blog to social media become very necessary when your blog is on its starting period, anyway thanks for sharing this useful article.
    • David Anderson says:
      Thanks Malik, It's good to work in a social media program with your blog when you start out, that way you already have it planned in and set up from the very beginning. I should blog gets busier, it's often difficult to setup a social media program when you are fully up and running, as you have many other things to do with as well.
  4. Kimsea says:
    thanks for sharing! I love the post. I try many social media but not yet for youtube. I heard that the video marketing is now the most popular and there thousands videso were viewed a day.
    • David Anderson says:
      Hi Kimsea, many thanks for the comment :) Yes you are correct, although the numbers are a little larger than you mention. Video marketing has become one of the biggest and potentially cheapest way to promote your website all products. here are some numbers for you that I just pulled off from the You Tube press statistics page:- Traffic Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month Over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US YouTube is localized in 43 countries and across 60 languages In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or around 140 views for every person on Earth
  5. Gel Maine says:
    Well said. Social media is such a great help in promoting your product. Hence, it has been used by businessman as an effective tool for advertising and promotion. When you share your contents to this social networking sites the possibility to be view is possible since social media are composed of many people like a community. Thanks for this post. Wonderful :D
    • David Anderson says:
      Hi Gel, I am pleased that you liked the post, it makes it all worthwhile! You are absolutely right it is all about community and communication.
  6. Jules says:
    This is such a great post! As blogger our aim is to attract people and increase the traffic of our sites. Social Media is a great help in marketing your products and services. It is very important as you have lots of competitors out there, when people find your content interesting they end up purchasing your products.
  7. Purnima says:
    Agreed . Choosing the social media sites on which one should focus and being clear of what to post are important steps as they demonstrate ones credibility .Keeping an eye on the competition is vital .
    • David Anderson says:
      Yes, being focused and clear on what you're doing with your posts is imperative, as once its out there it's there for all to see. So you need to make sure that it is right as you are building your credibility through this medium.
  8. James says:
    There are so many social media sites for promoting our blogs. We should have the right idea of doing so. Putting up a piece of content on every site will make no sense. We need to have correct marketing strategy for promoting our blog with the help of social media. Social media needs to be understood first.
    • David Anderson says:
      That's a good point James. Something I would always advise you to do would be to find one of the leaders in your niche, study what they are doing, take careful notes of things that you would like them to be doing, note the things that you don't think they're doing particularly well, and then follow a similar plan of action whilst improving on all the points I mentioned above. This way you are learning from something that is already existing, but making it better!
  9. Vivek says:
    Social networking is the best method for promotion of articles and blog posts. But they have a lot more importance. Very soon Author rank is going to rule the SEO. Then not only bloggers and webmasters and internet marketers will focus on social networking but search engines will also give maximum weightage to social signals to rank any webpage on SERPs.
    • David Anderson says:
      Good point Vivek, I've made a few posts on Google authorship on my blog, this is a whole new ballpark though!
  10. Achala says:
    Agreed, it's really essential to focus on social media to promote your business and blog. Many search engines including Google give more attention to social media trends while ranking any website. Promoting on social media in correct way can help you to find large number of relevant audience.
    • David Anderson says:
      Well, said Achala, Google does indeed pay particular attention to social media trends!
  11. Ram Shengale says:
    Facebook is a great way to promote your blog posts. The best way of converting your Facebook posting in visitors is to use images. I learned this from SocialMediaExaminer to post a snapshot of your posts and have found that they really convert well. Ram
    • David Anderson says:
      Hi Ram, Yes you are right about using images. images are vitally important in any marketing done weather is online or off-line, the way the brain and the eyes work together means that people are will automatically drawn to images. The only word of warning with this is the images do you really need to be relevant to your posting or it can have the opposite effect.