Social Media for Bloggers
If you want to get more readers and traffic to your blog, having an active social media presence can help make that easier to achieve. There are a lot of blogs out there, and sticking out in the crowd can sometimes be tough. Social media platforms give you opportunities to highlight your blog posts and get more attention from potential and current readers.
In this guide, we will go over some of the ways that social media can help your blog become more popular as well as give an overview of some of the most popular social media sites and other tools that you might find useful.
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How Social Media Can Increase Traffic to Your Blog
The main reason that most bloggers use social media is to attract and retain more readers. Social media sites can help do this in several different ways:
- Improves SEO - Social media pages are often some of the most visible results in internet searches. Regular and relevant social media posts that link to your blog is one way these platforms can increase hits on your blog.
- Sharing your content - Social media sites don’t just give you a platform to share your content with readers, they give those readers the ability to share your posts with their own social networks. This can create a strong “word-of-mouth” marketing effect.
- Targeted ads - Social media sites give you the ability to create targeted ad campaigns for whatever demographic you are trying to reach.
- Networking - You can interact with readers, influencers, companies, and other bloggers on social media, which can open up various opportunities to gain readers.
- Brand building - Using social media can help build awareness of your brand, which can translate into more traffic to your blog.
Popular Social Media Platforms
There are a lot of social media platforms out there. Whatever your niche is, it is likely that you can find a social network that fits. These smaller services can be a valuable tool, but the vast majority of social media-driven traffic comes from a handful of popular platforms.
While not the newest or trendiest social media site, Facebook is one of the most established and widely used in the world, and it offers a great opportunity to increase traffic to your blog, regardless of what you’re writing about.
With Facebook, you can create a “page” for your blog and alert readers of your new blog posts. In addition to this, one of Facebook’s most useful features is its groups. There are countless public and private groups on the site that bring together people with similar interests. These collections of people are a built-in potential audience for your blog, and sharing posts there can be a very effective way to gain readers.
Facebook also has a powerful advertising service that allows you to create custom ad campaigns targeting specific demographics.
In addition to these features, Facebook makes it easy for readers to interact with your blog and share your content with others. It is a great idea to have Facebook “like” and “share” buttons on every one of your blog posts.
Twitter is one of the best social media platforms for bloggers. There are a few ways it can help your blog grow. The most obvious is sharing links to your blog in your tweets. Because of Twitter’s character limit on posts, it lends itself to things like links and blurbs about your content. You can utilize relevant hashtags to help your tweets show up on feeds of people who may be interested in the topic that you are blogging about.
In addition to just tweeting out links to your blog posts, you can use Twitter to comment on various topics relevant to what you typically blog about. If other Twitter users see you making funny, interesting, or insightful comments, they might start to follow you and check out your blog posts as well.
You can also use Twitter to connect with new people or interact with existing readers of your blog. This sort of engagement can help in attracting new readers and keeping old ones.
Many bloggers credit Pinterest with driving more traffic to their blog than any other social media platform. One of its benefits is that it acts as a search engine where people can easily find content related to topics that interest them.
With Pinterest, you create “boards” and “pins” to organize, save, share, and highlight various types of online content. You can pin content to your own boards as well as to collaborative group boards if you are accepted as a contributor.
One important thing to keep in mind about Pinterest is that it is a very visual-based platform. This makes it important to spend time not only crafting quality blog posts but also designing attractive pins to highlight your content.
While it has a reputation as being primarily a professional networking tool, LinkedIn is becoming increasingly popular among a wide variety of people, and it is a useful tool for promoting your blog and creating valuable connections.
LinkedIn allows you to join and create groups related to your profession, interests, location, and more. This helps connect you with people who are likely to be interested in the content in your blog.
It also gives you a good platform to highlight your expertise in a particular area. If you can establish yourself as a knowledgeable and reliable source of information, you might be surprised by the opportunities that arise. This includes making valuable connections with PR professionals and others.
Instagram can be a powerful social media platform for blogs that lend themselves to more-visual posts. Topics like design, travel, nature, etc. are great examples of content that can get a boost from Instagram.
Selecting an attention-grabbing image and hashtags that tie into your blog content and including a blurb about your post and a link can capture readers who might not have otherwise found you.
Other Social Media Platforms
There are many other sites that could be useful for your blog, including Reddit, YouTube, Last.fm, and many more. Depending on your niche, utilizing these sites, along with the larger ones, could help drive traffic to your blog. If you know of specific social media platforms popular with your blog’s target audience, you should absolutely be there socializing with them.
Useful Tools and Apps
There are various tools and apps that can help you get the most out of your social media accounts. Here are some that we find useful:
- Buffer - Allows you to schedule posts across several social media platforms, with both free and paid versions available. This can help streamline your social media posting and save you tons of time.
- PicMonkey - Image creating and editing program that offers template designs for specific social media platforms. Creating images that are “native” to each of the platforms helps get the most from each user interaction.
- Tailwind - Helps schedule pins and share content on Pinterest. Pinterest is a little different than other platforms in the way that it operates. This tool is specialized to make the best use of Pinterest.
- Hootsuite - Similar to Buffer, this tool schedules and organizes posts across various social media platforms, offering several levels of service.
- Canva - An easy-to-use image editing program with both free and paid options. Beautiful and helpful original images are one of the best ways to make your blog posts stand above the rest.
Conclusion
The truth is, if you want your blog to reach as wide an audience as possible, you’ll probably have to spend about as much time on social media as you do writing your blog posts. While this might seem intimidating at first, once you get the hang of using the different social media platforms and the various tools that are available to simplify the process, the routine becomes much easier.