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A Better Guide to Promoting Your Content with Social Media

Authors: Garrett Moon Garrett Moon
Posted Under: Social Media
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A Better Guide to Promoting Your Content with Social Media

What happens once your blog post goes live?

A million shares? A zillion click-throughs? A bit less than that?

Well then, you might need a better content promotion strategy for social media.

For a long time now, we’ve been hearing the benefits of content creation, and the cries have been heard. Content is being created. In fact, there were 730 million blog posts published in 2014 alone!

But, with all that content floating around, the conversation is starting to change. These days, we don’t necessarily need more content, but rather, we need to get more return out of the content we are already creating.

Think about it; it’s good math. Less content with better promotion can equal more traffic. And one of the ways to get there is through great social media promotion.

And creating less content—but better content—can help you and your team focus your efforts to be more productive with the resources you already have.

Yes, you can create less content and get more traffic. (click to tweet)

Set A Social Media Promotion Schedule And Double Your Traffic

All too often as content creators, we fall into the problematic “post and tweet” pattern. A new post goes live, we share it once to all of our networks, and then we never get around to sharing it again. This is a huge missed opportunity.

You need to share your content more than once on social media.

Let’s be clear, we’re not talking about auto-tweeting social media spam here. There is a better way.

The first step to better social media promotion is to actually create a social media promotion plan. This is a simple schedule that will work as a guide or a template that you can use each time you publish new content on your blog.

A good schedule will take into account the unique aspects of every social network and adjust the frequency of content accordingly. Here’s a visual way to think about a social media promotion schedule.

A social sharing scheduling timeline

You can create your own social media promotion schedule by listing all of the networks you use at the top of a page and work your way down a simple timeline. This visualization can then be carried over to an actual calendar.

Fully realized, here’s is what one of our own timelines look like at CoSchedule.

CoSchedule social media timeline

 No matter what you come up with, there are a few key trigger points that you’ll want to consider for your own social media promotion schedule.

On publish – Social messages publish when your blog posts go live.

Same day – Initial social messages trickle out to your accounts throughout the next 2–3 hours.

Next day – Messages are shared again on the appropriate social channels.

Next week – Another series of messages are pre-scheduled and sent the following week.

Next month – More social messages are pre-scheduled for the following month. This is especially important for evergreen content.

Next _____ – Additional messages can optionally be scheduled for the three-month mark or beyond.

Later, you can dip into your Google Analytics account to see how each post is performing.

CoSchedule Google Analytics

With this single post, you can easily see the our original share resulted in 108 total sessions, while the follow-up shares brought in another 93 clicks just from Twitter alone. Multiply this effect across all of your networks, and it adds up to a lot of extra traffic.

Don’t Be A Spam-Bot

As I write this, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking about the guy on Twitter who constantly tweets his own links with an automatic robot.

That sucks, and it’s not what I’m advocating here.

The difference comes down to what I think of as “consistent curation.” Not only do you need to use a smart publishing schedule to curate your own social media promotion timeline, but you also need to curate your own social messages to ensure that each of them provides value to your audience.

Most of the automated solutions simply tweet the headline and link of a blog post over and over again. Rather than running things on autopilot, try adding more variety to your content. That is the approach we take with our social media scheduling tool (CoSchedule).

Warning: this will be a bit more labor intensive, but I promise that it’s worth it.

Here a few easy ways you can add more variety to your social media promotion schedule.

Ask a question – Engage your audience in conversation by not only promoting your post, but starting a conversation. Many blog posts actually end with a question as a way to stir up comments. Why not ask this question in a few social messages as well?

Cite a fact – If your post cites any surveys or technical details, use them as pull-quotes from your posts. Data like this is really engaging and will give your readers a taste of what’s to come.

Share a tweetable quote – Adding Click To Tweet quotes for blog content has become a common practice. Why not use that content for your own social messages as well?

Add intrigue – Sometimes, the best way to capture attention is through a bit of mystery and intrigue. Write a few cliffhangers and see what your followers say.

Use alternate headlines – We frequently write several headlines (sometimes 25!) before making our final selection. Don’t let those extra headlines go to waste! Use some of the leftover good ones as a way to mix up your social content. You may even find some that work better than the headline you chose for the actual post.

Here’s the deal—you simply can’t do enough to promote your blog on social media. So often, we like to cross the finish line on publishing our content, and then we fail to promote it as best we can.

Social media is the low-hanging fruit. You’ve got to do it, and it will definitely be worth the extra time that it takes to do it right. Never let your content go to waste!

P.S. If your looking for a easy way to connect your blog content and social media schedule, take a look at CoSchedule, which brings it all together in one interface.

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