Cross-Promote Your Site and Social Properties

You have a successful blog and you’ve created various accounts on social networks. Cross-promoting those accounts means promoting your social properties on your site and, in turn, your blog on your social properties.

A successful blog has a constant stream of new visitors. Many of these readers will have accounts on major social networks. Your goal is to let them know about your presence there as well.

This will not only allow you to better connect with visitors in an environment that they’re already familiar with, it will also help you grow your presence there. Furthermore, search engines are now considering social media signals when determining the ranking of your pages. Articles that are popular on social media have an advantage over those that don’t receive any attention from social media users.

Your network of followers and fans can quickly expand if your site or blog visitors engage with the social call to actions on your pages.

For all these reasons, you should announce your social media properties on your blog when you create them. You should also include social media icons or widgets that invite people to like your Facebook page, follow you on Twitter, follow you on Instagram (if you opted to have an account there) and so on. You can find all sorts of widgets and snippets of codes to achieve these actions if you just search online, and your blog theme might already have such features built in. On blogs, such widgets are typically placed in the header area or at the top of the sidebar.

When visitors follow you on Twitter, your follower count increases, which in turn shows social proof as well. Finally, when visitors like your Facebook page through your site, they’ll increase the Facebook counter shown to your visitors, automatically subscribe to your updates on Facebook, and broadcast that they just liked your page to a subset of their friends.

For Facebook, opt to use the official Like button or the Page plugin to show a sample of your existing followers to prospective followers.^[128] Faces add a human element that may increase engagement from your visitors as well as trust for your blog or business (after all, other humans trusted you enough to like you already).

For Twitter, opt for its Follow button or one of the many other options available on the official site (e.g., showing your tweet timeline in the sidebar).^[129]

Your follower count should be shown (both for Facebook and Twitter). As we discussed before when talking about other counters, showing that you have a large following acts as social proof that what you’re doing is worthwhile, interesting, and worth paying attention to. If your numbers are very small initially, you might consider switching to a counter only after gathering a sizable following.

Most major social networks have equivalent buttons, widgets, and counters available, so you just need to pick which ones and add them to your blog.

If you’re trying to attract a large following, you can make your social properties part of your call to action. At the bottom of your blog posts, for example, you could invite readers to like your page, follow you on Twitter, and so on. However, too many calls to action become a distraction for the user and will kill your conversion rate to your true desired outcome (e.g., joining your newsletter).

Don’t expect miracles, but between the announcements you’ll make, your invitation to your existing network of contacts, and the follow buttons/widgets on your blog, you should create an initial following so that you don’t post updates on social media like a performer in an empty concert hall.

With the rise of social media, we’ve seen mentions of social properties become increasingly popular in offline advertisement campaigns (e.g., fliers, billboards, and TV commercials and programs). Even software programs integrate social features in an attempt to have users share with their friends the fact that they’re using that particular software, achieved a particular milestone (e.g., introducing an element of gamification), and so on.

It’s all fair play as long as you understand that your social media presence is an important but distant secondary goal to the growth of your newsletter. Your Facebook page, Twitter handle, or other social media pages can be included in your other marketing activities to draw attention to them, but they shouldn’t be included in lieu of your blog. This is especially true if you’re doing any paid advertisement.

For example, Facebook will tempt you to pay to reach a larger number of people, inviting them to like your page. If you’re going to pay, you may as well run the campaign to get people to sign up to your newsletter in exchange for an alluring lead magnet or buying a particular product you created.

After you’re done setting up a way for your visitors to discover your social properties, you should ensure that the same is true the other way around, too. People may come to know you via social networks by way of their friends or by randomly searching for a word used by your status updates (e.g., people searching JavaScript on Twitter). You want them to immediately be aware of your site when they discover you this way.

This is why I recommended earlier that you include the URL of your blog (or site if you’re representing a business) on sites like Twitter and Facebook. Include it in your header image as well (in the case of Twitter and Facebook) and whenever possible in your status updates. Whatever you opt to do, don’t be shy with your main URL on social properties (within the limits of each site’s policy and the netiquette for that particular community).