There is no one way to do social media right, but there are a million ways to get it wrong. When it comes to promoting your blog, growing your audience and building relationships with readers in your niche, there are some things that will definitely put you in the black book.
Start with a good fresh strategy for 2016. If you’re guilty of any of the offences below, it’s time to step up your social media game and start getting the results your blog deserves.
1. No one is interacting with you on social media
If you’re posting away and none of your fans are responding or sharing your posts, that’s a huge red flag. Either your content is really boring, really annoying (ads, affiliate links, etc.) or your fans are fakes. Try switching up your content and checking your statistics to see if people are actually seeing your posts.
Of course, if you have no (or very few) fans to begin with, this is perfectly normal.
2. People you talk to online are just part of a nameless, faceless mob
If someone shares your blog post and your response is ‘Thanks’, ‘Thank you’ or any variation of these, you have a problem. Part of growing an active community of advocates is building deeper relationships with those who like you until the come to love you and share that love with others.
It’s great to be able to identify fans by who they are in real life, not just on one platform. Oktopost has a ‘lead management’ feature which is perfect for this. It allows you to create a profile of a person which includes their handles on the relevant social media networks and your contact history.
This way, when someone contacts you, you can get a quick reminder about what you’ve spoken about before, what their interests are and say something better than a generic ‘Thank you’. That’s how you build relationships.
3. It takes more than 30 minutes to check in on your pages daily
Unless you’re running the world’s greatest blog, you should be able to monitor and respond to activities on social media is a few minutes a day. Set up alerts to notify you on your phone when messages come in or use a social media management tool (like Oktopost, mentioned above) to pull all your notifications into one place.
4. No one is sharing your blog posts
If you write interesting posts about topics people care about, readers are likely to share to their own social networks. You need to make them easy to share by including sharing icons on your blog posts. If your current theme doesn’t come with this feature built in, try getting the Flare or SumoMe plugin for great looking social media bars that appear to the side or below your posts.
If you think they are being shared but you’re just not seeing it, try setting up Google Alerts or using Mention to track any online mentions of your blog name or domain.
5. Your social media feeds are deserted
There are so many social media pages for blog that fit into one of the following categories:
- Feeds are empty – all that exists is the name and the last post was two years ago, even though the blog is still active.
- Filled with their own posts – the owner only uses the platform to push their latest blog. It reads like an ad stream.
- Inspirational quotes, memes and links – someone told them that these get the most likes so this is all they share everyday.
Boring! Your content needs to be diversified and relevant to your ideal audience. Take some time to research great content each week that you can share along with your own blog posts.
6. You’re spending half your days just finding something to share
If the reason you’re not sharing valuable content is because it takes too long to find anything worth sharing, there are several tools that can help.
Swayy, (now part of SimilarWeb) allows you to plug in keywords, then gives you a long list of relevant articles and content around the web. It even sends you a daily email with the top posts. When you’ve identified a few related (or competing) blogs that share great content, add them to Feedly so you can see when they publish new posts.
These significantly reduce the time you waste scouring the Internet every week.
7. You have no clue what results you’re getting from social media
Tracking your results is the key to telling whether your blog is having an impact and/or growing. You won’t get better at blogging, if you don’t know how your posts are performing. Some forego analytics altogether because it seems complex, but it doesn’t have to be.
SumAll is a great measurement tool that pulls in all the analytics from other tools in a way you can understand. Just plug in your Google Analytics, social media pages, etc and it provides you with an easy-to-understand list of metrics. It also sends you regular emails showing the stats most important to you – comparing this period’s performance to the last period so you can see if you’re improving or not.
Conclusion
We hope that this post helps you to not only identify the areas that need improvement, but also use the suggested tips and tools to grow your blog through social media. Once you keep working at it, you’ll soon find promoting your blog to be just another routine task, not the scary time-consuming activity is now. Good luck!
Image Credit: Esther Vargas
