Promoting your blog post with social media tools

How to increase traffic to your blog post with social media tools

Having talked about all the main places you can promote your blog posts, here I discuss bookmarking sites and a few social media tools that will help you be more productive and effective.

Bookmarking sites

These are sites like Digg, Delicious and Stumbleupon where you can bookmark your favourite websites and blogs. I post to these via a social media tool called OnlyWire (see below) which makes the task easy.

If you wanted to post to just one I would recommend Stumbleupon. It gives me the most consistent traffic so it’s worth signing up for. Plus you can find some pretty unusual and intriguing content by using it for research into your favourite subjects.

Then there is also good old email. Some people will have subscribed to your RSS via email or use an RSS reader to consume your content. You might want to send direct emails telling people about your new blog post or include the post in your next newsletter.

Social media tools for promoting your blog post

OnlyWire

This is a paid-for service which allows you to post to up to 50 social media platforms. They also provide ways to monitor your social media accounts, respond to comments, provide analytics to track your performance and give you recommendations of content that you might want to share.

The entry point is $59.99 per year (£36.18 in English money). That’s just over £3 a month for 1000 submissions. Which will be more than enough for any small to medium business. Even looking after a number of blogs I still get nowhere near that amount.

I use OnlyWire to post my content to 14 social media accounts. This allows me to promote new posts both for me and my clients. It makes it a lot less hassle than going into each one to post my content. Precious time saved.

Buffer

I love Buffer and it’s a free alternative to Onlywire if you just want to post to the four main social media networks. You can upgrade for about £10 a month to post to more. I may migrate here from OnlyWire as it has an edge in my opinion.

Like OnlyWire it allows you to post to more than one network at the same time so promoting your posts is pretty easy. Plus it links up with Tweriod to post buffered content at the time that most of your followers are online.

You can also post something immediately, schedule posts, and post something to jump the Buffer queue of scheduled posts to be submitted in the next slot. Buffer also provide useful content that you might want to share at a click of a button. Analytics are pretty good too which means you can tell what types of posts are getting the interaction you want and at what times.

Perhaps my favourite application for social media promotion is the use of the Buffer share button which you can add to your browser’s toolbar. That makes it easy to share your posts and also to curate content on the fly. It also allows you to highlight text which will be automagically used as the headline for your post. So if you find a pithy quote or sentence you can use that as your headline.

When you discover useful content whilst browsing you just need to click on the Buffer button and it takes you to your account where you can share immediately. Pretty cool stuff and currently one of my favourite social media tools.

And don’t forget your smartphone!

Perhaps one of my most used social media tools is my iPhone 5. I am linked up to most of my social media platforms as you can see from the screen shot of my apps above!

It helps me add content to my social media sites in real time when I’ve got some downtime (such as waiting for a train, waiting for someone at a meeting, travelling etc.) It also allows me to get creative and add some colour and movement to my postings using Instagram.

Instagram is an up-and-coming app for small business to promote their products to a social audience. Vine is yet to prove itself since six seconds isn’t quite long enough to get your message across. Unfortunately Vine was closed down in October 2016. It was owned by Twitter and was not growing fast enough for it to be financially viable to continue. You can now use the Vine camera app to take looping videos and post them to Twitter but a lot of users were sad to see this app go.

I also use Buffer on my iPhone and it links up with Feedly too which allows you to find relevant content to share with your followers. You can specify what types of stories to follow to feed your audience and be seen as a thought leader in your niche.

So using these social media tools is a great way to streamline your social media efforts. They also make your social sharing relevant, well-timed and effective.

Ideally you shouldn’t need to spend more than 15 minutes a day with social media. Get organised and pick the right tools.

What social media tools do you use for your business? I must have missed something!