Social Media Marketing Tips: blogging tips

Re-posting blog content allows you to get a full life out of your content. As you grow the blog you’ll build up a great collection of articles, but they won’t all be hits right away. You can give these great articles new life by continuing to promote them on social media and through other channels.

Here are the steps to take to re-post your content on your social media profiles to build up that organic social media traffic to your blog.

Step 1 Identify Old Posts For Sharing

You could create a spreadsheet to do this, but we get a little too geeky with the spreadsheets in these guides so we’ll take an easier route.

Open up your WordPress dashboard and click on the Posts link in the left hand navigation. This will show you previous posts on your blog. You’ll be able to see 20 at a time by default.

If you click on Screen Options at the top right you’ll have the option to see more (or less if you want).

For this exercise, 20 works, but more might work depending on how many posts you want to schedule at one time.

In a new tab, open up Buffer or if you’re just sharing one old post at a time you can open up your various social profiles.

Step 2 Creating New Titles

Identify a post you want to share. Since all of your posts will be great you can choose any of them.

You’ll see your original title of the post, which you can use again if it’s catchy. But if you want to share something fresh you can create a new title.

There are a few different ways to come up with new titles.

First, simply change the title with something similar and just as catchy.

The original title:

10 WAYS TO UNCLOG YOUR DRAIN

The new title:
YOU WON’T BELIEVE HOW THIS PERSON UNCLOGS THEIR DRAIN

Second, you can grab some text from the post and use that as the new title. Quotes and stats work well.

Use variations of those options and you should have no shortage of new titles for your post.

Step 3 Sharing Old Posts Using Buffer

Enter the new title into Buffer or into the social profile where you’ll be sharing.

Right click on the View link under the post you’re sharing and paste it to Buffer or to the profile where you’ll share the old post as a new update.

Again, with Buffer you can add these old titles to your queue so the posts will share at your set times throughout the day and week. This is a great way to fill out your social profiles with content so that those profiles remain active during the peak times even if you’re busy.

Step 4 Retweeting Old Posts Using WordPress Plugins

There are plugins that will automatically retweet your old blog posts.

You can schedule these tweets to publish at intervals such as every hour, two hours, etc. throughout the day and week.

PLUGINS INCLUDE:

Source: http://www.quicksprout.com/the-complete-guide-to-building-your-blog-audience-chapter-5/

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.