Promote Your Articles on Social Networks

In this section (and the next), we’ll talk about promoting your articles on a variety of social media sites.

The same principles can be applied to new social networks that will pop up in the future, as well as to specialized social media sites for your particular sector that aren’t named here.

General Social Networks for Promoting Your Blog

You should use the following general social media sites:

Consider Instagram and Pinterest as optional, but they can be effective marketing channels. In 2018, Google announced that Google+ would be discontinued for consumers, so you can safely ignore that social network.

Great content of yours might be shared on these sites by people you don’t even know. Nevertheless, it’s important to get the ball rolling by sharing your own articles yourself. If you opt to promote your articles on Instagram and Pinterest (not a bad idea), make sure you generate images since these social networks are picture-based. These can be diagrams, charts, images of code from your posts, or significant quotes on fancy background images.

The success of your own promotion on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn will largely depend on your network of friends and followers. If you don’t have existing accounts on the sites mentioned above, now would be a good time to create them and start adding friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. (More on this in the chapter on social media strategies.)

Your Promotional Workflow

Whenever you publish a new article on your site, you should go ahead and perform some basic initial promotion on social media sites that you’re targeting. Don’t forget to also do this for articles that you scheduled a while ago that just went live. A calendar reminder might be a good idea if you schedule your posts to be published automatically.

Announcing your new posts on social media can be automated as well. Some services will do this for you from your RSS feed, and it’s often even built in within blogging systems like WordPress. An argument could be made that this is very convenient and will ensure that you don’t forget to do so yourself. Nevertheless, I tend to prefer and recommend that you perform this workflow manually every time you post.

This approach has three key advantages:

1. You get to decide when the post is shared on social media. You might, after all, publish a post at a time that isn’t ideal for promotion on social media (say, at night or very early morning in your target geography).

2. You can customize the message for each social media channel. Your audience on your Facebook personal profile (friends and family) will be different from your Twitter account (followers) or your LinkedIn professional connections. You might want to announce the post differently to each audience, tag specific people, use or not use hashtags as appropriate (e.g., yes on Twitter, no on Facebook), and so on.

3. You have the option to skip promoting a particular post you don’t want to broadcast on social media (for whatever reason).

A tool like Buffer simplifies the process of posting customized messages to multiple social accounts you own.^[74] It’s a time saver and offers some nice features like analytics to track how well your post announcements (and other social media messages you post) perform.

After publishing an article, don’t forget to send out the newsletter to your mailing list subscribers as well, if you haven’t automated that step. Unlike social media rebroadcasting, I tend to automate RSS to mailing list messaging, as the process of sending a manual email each time is a little more time-consuming than posting on social media (especially if using Buffer).

Make sure that Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn correctly pick up the title, meta description, and an image before posting on them. Social media posts with a preview of the link, as opposed to just a naked link, tend to perform significantly better. This doesn’t apply to Instagram and Pinterest, where the image you post is the key content and there are no link previews. (To learn more about how social media pick up information from your post, research the topic of Open Graph meta tags online.)

Alternatively, use the image you’re going to post on Instagram and Pinterest as the preview for your announcements on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn as well (just make sure you still share the actual link to the post in your message).

On Instagram, linking is limited. One option you have is to link your latest post to your account bio, adding in the description of your image a reminder that “the link to this article is available in my bio.”

When promoting your posts on social media, it’s important not to get discouraged by the relative lack of engagement. Even if you have ten thousand followers on a given platform, it doesn’t mean that all of them will like and share your post. Even worse, it doesn’t even mean that all of them will be shown the post in the first place. So adjust your expectations accordingly.

You’re broadcasting on social media that you published something new. You’re making people aware of your articles, and it might help you SEO-wise because Google takes into consideration popularity on social media in its ranking algorithm. It’s perfectly normal to only see a few clicks on your articles unless you luck out (e.g., you get lots of retweets) or someone popular picks it up, spreading your message further.

Stick with it. It will help your blog in the long run and raise your profile on the social media properties where you keep being active and promoting your content.