If you run a blog, you may or may not have set up social media accounts for it. If you have, you might have made the accounts under your own name or perhaps the name of your blog. Either way, you need to link your blog and your social media accounts. Your blog can encourage people to follow you on social media for extra content, while your social media accounts can help to guide people toward your blog. You have a variety of ways you can integrate your social media with your blog. Start by doing the things below to tie them together.
Consistent Branding Across Platforms
If you’re marketing your brand across different platforms, you need to make sure you’re consistent. You need to be the same on your blog as you are on your Facebook or Instagram accounts, even if the formats are different. Of course, first, you need to ensure you have a defined brand. If you can’t describe your brand, you need to have a think about just how you want to present your blog. You should have some idea of what your blog represents and what sort of things are suitable for it. You should be able to look at a piece of content and know whether it’s “you.” Think about the tone of voice you use and the topics you cover, as well as the styling your blog uses. You need to impart these to your social media accounts too.
Preparing Blog Posts with Social Media in Mind
When you start using your social media accounts, you need to think about them when you create your blog posts. When you set up a new post, you should be thinking about how it’s going to appear when you post it to one of your social media accounts. For example, what image will show up in your post when you link to it on Facebook or Twitter? Do you have an image you can post on Instagram or Snapchat that you can use to tell people about your new post? You should think about the meta description you use for your posts too, as this often shows up under the image and title for your link.
Link to Social Media on Your Blog (and Vice Versa)
Once you have your social media accounts set up, make sure that you link to them on your blog. It’s easy to add some buttons for each of the platforms you use. In fact, many blog templates come with them as standard. But don’t leave buttons that lead nowhere if you’re not using all of these platforms. As well as having simple icon buttons, you can also use “calls to action” to encourage people to visit and like your pages. For example, you can have text or a button that says “Like my Facebook page.” Don’t forget to link to your blog on your social media pages too.
Put Like and Share Buttons on Your Blog
As well as icon buttons, you can also use “like” and “share” buttons on your blog. These can appear on every post on your blog so that people can share individual posts that they like. This is a way for people to use their own social media accounts to engage with your blog, rather than for you to link to your blog. You can use share buttons for a variety of platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and more. You can also use Pinterest if you want to allow people to pin the images you use or whole posts.
Promote Your Brand Partners on Social Media and Your Blog
Monetizing a blog is an aim for a lot of bloggers. You might already be working with brand partners to promote their products and services. But if you’re not, perhaps you’re looking for some people to work with. If you decide you want to start acting as an influencer, you can use services like Rep – Influencer Marketing that will match you up with brands. Having a substantial blog readership and plenty of followers on social media will help you to connect with people. Of course, you also want to find brands that work for you. If you run a beauty blog, you probably don’t want to be promoting electronics.
Automatically Post New Blog Content on Social Media
After you publish a new blog post, going around your social media accounts to share it can be time-consuming. However, you can make sure your posts are shared automatically and with ease. If you use WordPress, it’s easy to set up social media sharing when you create your post. There are also various tools you can use to post to more than one platform at once, including Hootsuite, Buffer, and TweetDeck. However, remember that you need your posts to work for each platform. For example, if you use Twitter, your posts need to be 140 characters or shorter.
Promote Your Blog Posts
Just sharing your new blog posts on social media is, of course, a good way to let people know about them. But don’t stop there if you want to promote your posts. There are a number of things you can do on social media to give your posts more exposure. Firstly, you don’t only have to post each blog post once. You can share them again to ensure different audiences get a chance to see them. This is especially important on fast-moving platforms like Twitter. You can also use hashtags, especially on Twitter and Instagram, to help people find your content.
Include Social Media Widgets on Your Blog
You might also want to display your social media posts right on your blog. You can use the side or the foot of your blog to display a widget that shows your posts. Many blog owners use these for their Facebook or Twitter feeds, so people can get a taste for what they post about. Make sure you’re posting other content, and not just linking back to your blog.
There are lots of ways you can link your social media accounts to your blog. You can increase traffic and followers for both if you do it correctly.
Reblogged this on Ana's Lair and commented:
Have you done this yet?
Woot Woot!! As someone who used to do this for a living I couldn’t agree with this post more. It’s all so easy but so many people forget to link social media up their blogs properly. 😳