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Once you’ve created a new blog post or other piece of editorial content, your job is not over. You now have to cross-promote that content across social media, looking for additional ways to drive traffic to your website. With that in mind, here are 5 ways to promote your content on social media.
#1: Facebook
Facebook is by far the most important social media platform for driving visitors and clicks to your content. The good news is that Facebook is amazingly flexible in how you use it. In fact, you have up to 10,000 characters of text for every new update, even if only the first 480 characters are visible within newsfeeds. Optimally, though, your Facebook update should be less than 50 characters, and it should always include an image and a link. (Usually, Facebook will auto-generate an image for you based on your link)
#2: Twitter
Twitter is perhaps the best social media platform if you are trying to position your new content as a response to breaking news, or as something that is extremely relevant to what people are talking about online right now. That’s because the average lifespan of a tweet is just 18 minutes. Since Twitter continually updates with what’s new, after 18 minutes have elapsed, your tweet has essentially been forced off the page. However, there are a few tricks of the trade that can boost the lifespan of a tweet. Adding hashtags, for example, make it more likely that someone trying to piece together a conversation or seeing what people are saying about a particular topic will discover your tweet later.
#3: LinkedIn
On LinkedIn, you have a variety of ways to promote your content. You could post it on your personal profile page, for example. Or, you could post it on your company page. And, finally, you could post it within a LinkedIn Group. You have 600 total characters to work with here, of which only the first 150 are visible.
#4: Pinterest
Many people think about Pinterest as just a place to curate beautiful images, but it can also be a way to promote content. You have to think visually, though, and focus on visual elements of your latest blog post that would work well as a pin. And you could also create a Pinterest album to group certain types of content by category. Thus, if you are a food blogger, you might separate your posts into albums for, say, “restaurant reviews” and “recipes.”
#5: Instagram
Instagram can be used to drive engagement around your blog post. That’s especially true if you use hashtags, which will make anything you post much easier to find for other people using Instagram. As a rule of thumb, however, Instagram is not going to be a major traffic driver for you, so if you are only interested in getting clicks back to your original content, Facebook and Twitter are preferable options.
Final Thought
When using these social media platforms to promote content, one important point to keep in mind is that you need to tailor your message to the specific social platform. Character counts matter, as do basic things like hashtag etiquette. The good news is that using all 5 social platforms at once gives you tremendous flexibility in helping to promote your new content as widely as possible.
