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Do you blog? Are you active on social media?
Have you integrated your blogging with your social activities?
Blogging can help you improve your social media marketing.
In this post, you'll discover four tips to enhance your social media efforts using your business blog.
#1: Share Your Blog Posts in Your Social Status Updates
Not sure what to post on your Facebook wall or Twitter profile? How about links to your blog posts?
The rule of thumb is to have a 80/20 split with 80% of your updates not self-promotional and 20% self-promotional. If you use the 20% self-promotional updates to share links to your blog content, you'll give your followers something more valuable to read than a product or service sales page.
Why is sharing your blog content on your social media profiles a good thing? For starters, you'll bring people from social media sites back to your blog.
Sharing your blog content on your social sites also helps you demonstrate your business's knowledge in your industry. This positions you as an informational leader. Becoming known as an authority in your industry can lead to speaking and even publishing opportunities that will ultimately boost your business's exposure—and your revenue generation.
Here are some best practices to follow.
In order to receive the best exposure for your content, you will want to determine when the majority of your audience is online. Buffer offers great analytics to track tweet statistics. And Facebook Insights can help you with timing your Facebook posts.
The advantage of Twitter is that you can reformat your tweets to share content with your Twitter updates multiple times.
For example, you can use the title of the post in the first update, create a variation of the title for a second update and then ask a question related to the post in the third update. This helps you reach your audience across multiple time zones.
If you want to get more engagement when you share your content, use different ways of posting your status updates.
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For example, on Facebook, post a photo to your wall and link to your content in the text of the post, since photo posts tend to get higher engagement than posts with just a link in them. See what works best for your audience.
When you mention specific people, products or businesses in your blog content, be sure to mention them again in your social updates when you share your post on social media. You can use @usernames in tweets and tag relevant people on Facebook and Google+. This increases the likelihood that these people will also share your content with their audience, potentially increasing your business's exposure with a new audience.
#2: Make Social Sharing Effortless
A great way to drive even more traffic to your blog posts is to allow your audience to share content for you.
Why do you want visitors sharing your content? One of the best reasons is to gain social proof for the content your business publishes. You'll also start to gain more readers and subscribers from followers of those who share your content.
Your content may even be featured in LinkedIn Today, LinkedIn's news section based on blog content that has been shared often on LinkedIn.
Here are some best practices to follow.
The best way to encourage others to share your content is to include social sharing buttons on your blog, preferably at the top and bottom of your blog posts.
Plugins that can help you achieve this include Add This (multiple blogging platforms), Share This, Sociable (WordPress self-hosted) and Digg Digg.
Another great way to encourage sharing is to ask visitors to share your content. Consider it a great call to action to add to all of your posts. You can even include tweetable nuggets throughout your blog posts by using the Clicktotweet tool.
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#3: Grow Your Social Followers Through Your Blogging
Do you want more Twitter followers, Facebook fans and Google+ followers? Blogging gives you a platform and provides opportunities where you can encourage readers to connect with you on social media.
Why do you want to build relevant followers through your blogging? These will be some of the best social followers for your business as they will be the ones most interested in your industry and in your content.
A relevant and targeted audience can ultimately turn into more leads and conversions for your business through social media. As you grow your targeted following on social media, you can also expect to receive more engagement when you share your content on your social profiles.
Here are some best practices to follow.
If you want to grow your Twitter following, be sure to use the official Twitter retweet button. This allows you to add your @username to the tweet and encourages people to follow your Twitter account after they tweet your posts.
Include a call to action at the end of your posts to the effect of “If you enjoyed this post, please follow us on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.” This also helps increase your social following. But only promote your main social media accounts. Giving too many options may lead people to choose not to follow any of them.
Since your business blog's design will likely feature a sidebar, include follow buttons so visitors can easily follow you on the top social networks.
Also, be sure to set up Google+ authorship on your blog. Your photo and Google+ profile will show up with content you author in Google's search results, which could lead to more Google+ followers (and click-throughs back to your posts).
#4: Send Social Advertising Links to Your Blog Content
If you find that the social advertising you have pointing directly to your landing pages, product pages and service pages is not getting traffic, you may want to look at advertising links to your blog content instead. If your content is valuable enough and written toward your targeted customer base, you could generate conversions from the blog posts you advertise.
Why share blog content in your social advertising? People who are not familiar with your business are more likely to click on an informational link vs. links to a sales page.
If your goal is engagement, blog content typically gets more likes, comments and shares than sales pages. This will make your Promoted Posts and Sponsored Stories on Facebook more impressive. Facebook Ads in particular can also lead to boosting your number of fans on Facebook.
Here are some best practices to follow.
To create a great ad, start with a strong title, description and image from your blog post. Also try making variations of your ad (such as LinkedIn advertising allows) to test your audience's response and engagement using different images, titles and descriptions for your blog posts.
To ensure that your ads are affecting your bottom line in a positive way, make sure to end each blog post with a strong call to action related to your products or services. This will give your ads more potential to lead to conversions and sales.
Then analyze the data from each social network's advertising analytics, as well as your blog's Google Analytics, to make sure your ads are receiving click-throughs, and that your blog content is turning visitors into conversions.
In Conclusion
If you are not seeing the results you'd like with your social media marketing, employ some of these tips to integrate your blogging into your social media marketing tactics. Be sure to let us know how it works for your business.
What do you think? What other ways have you seen your business blog benefit your social media efforts? Please share in the comments!
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