Social media marketing can take quite a bit of time. We’ve already discussed the process of building online communities that allow you to market to them over and over. It’s not small task to build those communities. And once you’ve built them it’s no easy task marketing your blog posts to them.
Thankfully, there are tools that make it easier.
Automation is your friend when it comes to sharing your blog posts on social media. In this section we’re going to go over the steps for automating as much of your content sharing as you can.
Step 1 WordPress Sharing
WordPress Sharing is possible if you use theJetpack for WordPressplugin. It provides a few services including stats right in WordPress and the sharing function, which automates sharing to a few social networks.
Go to your WordPress Dashboard.
On the left hand navigation hover over Settings and select Sharing in the secondary pop-out navigation.
Connect your blog to the social profiles your have chosen to use. As we’ve discussed, the most likely options are Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.
Next, when you start another blog post you’ll see the sharing settings at the top right near the scheduling widget in the editing area. Make sure the checkmarks are selecting for the profiles you setup.
For each new blog post the title will automatically become what is shared along with a link to your post. You can customize what is shared each time by editing the message in this area with each post.
By setting up this automation your new posts will automatically share to a few select social profiles meaning you won’t have to share them manually in as many places.
Step 2 Buffer
Buffer is a freemium social sharing tool. With the free version you can schedule up to ten posts into your queue for about a handful of different social profiles including your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ profiles.
If you’re going to use the free version of Buffer, which is a good place to start, setup each of the social profiles that you’re allowed. Some, like a LinkedIn company page, require the premium version.
Then setup your schedule. You’re given 10 items in the queue at once. Setup to have 10 items share each day for five days during the week. People don’t’ use the Internet as much on the weekends so it’s not as important to share on those days. However, if your industry is unique it might be important to share on weekends. One example would be if you’re an NFL reporter and you need to be active on Sundays.
You also want to share during the times that your target audience is online. For most, this will be from about 11:00 AM Eastern Time in the US to about 9:00 PM Eastern Time in the US. Again, if your customer is more localized than that in the US or somewhere else in the world you’ll have to adjust, but these are the general busy times on social networks.
Another way to determine the best times to share content on social networks is to use Followerwonk. We mentioned this tool earlier in this guide.
Followerwonk integrates with Buffer and identifies when your followers are most active on Twitter. It will also setup your updates to post at those times automatically for you right from Followerwonk.
Each day, schedule new posts to share 5 times every other hour during the day. Create a new, unique title for each of the times you share the post.
For example, the original title is 10 Surprising Ways To Unclog Your Kitchen Sink.
That would be the first title used to share the post.
The other four would be:
This gets your new blog post shared with your audience multiple times so that the most people have the most opportunity to see it. Yet your posts will appear unique because you’re changing the title each time.
And as you share more posts you’ll see the titles that work best with your audience.
For the other updates you can schedule with Buffer you’ll share old posts using the same title tactics, but we’ll talk about this in the next section on re-posting blog content.
If you opt for the paid version of Buffer you can schedule even more content. It’s good to work in content from other sources that are complementary to your blog. You don’t want to promote your own content all the time and it’s good to make those connections with other people that might be valuable members of your community.
Sharing their content is what they want and they’ll likely return the favor if you share theirs enough times.
When sharing updates on Buffer and on social media in general always use appropriate hashtags. These hashtags will work on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social networks.
To find the best hashtags for your blogs use services such as Hashtags.org,What The Trend and Taglus. These services (free and premium) show you trending hashtags, tags that have high (and low) traffic and suggested hashtags for your specific post.
Step 3 Dlvr.it
Dlvr.it is a similar automation tool that allows you to automatically share new posts to your social profiles. You can set this up using the RSS feed for your blog, which is usually (if you’re using WordPress):
yourblog.com/feed/ or yoursite.com/blog/feed/
With the free plan on dlvr.it you get 3 social profiles and 5 feeds. This allows you to share not only content from your own blog, but content from 4 other complementary blogs. Again, that gives you the opportunity to help others that may potentially help you in the future.
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