Blogging has become a must-have tool in your
There are many ways to build a loyal following and effectively market your content on social media. Here are a few suggestions and tips for beginners.
Time Is Not On Your Side
While there are excellent guides on how you can reach out to your readers using different social media sites, the real challenge with building social traffic is time.
The importance of getting traction with your blog posts using social media is highlighted by Social Triggers’ Derek Halpern and his 80/20 rule – spend 20% of your time producing your content and 80% promoting it.
While this approach makes a lot of sense given Google’s continued focus on links, you may also find yourself not fully executing your social media marketing plan because of the tedious nature of updating your different accounts and actively reaching out to other people about your content.
With that comes the problem – failing to implement a balanced content marketing strategy because something is annoying or painfully time-consuming. Despite the difficulty of social media marketing, there is a way to help you optimize your efforts and increase ROI.
Automate Your Promotions!
IFTTT is an online tool to help you promote your blog content on social media much more conveniently by letting you create “recipes” using different websites in order to create a trigger and action channel.
For instance, if there’s a new blog post published on your WordPress blog (or any other blogging platform supported by the site), then the post can be automatically shared on your social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
In order to self-regulate your social media promotions, here’s what you should do using IFTTT:
- Get the RSS feed of your blog and burn it using FeedBurner.com. This way, you can also monitor subscriber counts and other relevant data regarding your feed.
- Register for an account at IFTTT and log in to the dashboard in order to create a recipe.
- Click on the ‘this’ link and choose the Feed trigger channel. Upon clicking, you can choose between a ‘new feed item’ triggers (acknowledges every new post you publish your on blog) or ‘new feed item matches’ (only acknowledge blog posts that contain the keyword phrase you entered here). In order to finalize the creation of the trigger, you must enter the FeedBurner feed of your blog.
For your action channel, choose the applicable social media sites that you want to promote on. Each channel can be edited according to your specifications so that the automated posts going down these sites still have a personalized feel to them.
- Facebook – Choose ‘create a link post’ and edit the title and message that will appear along with your link. You can use short codes from the site to draw information from your RSS feed such as post title, author and content.
- Twitter – Choose ‘post a tweet’ and edit the message that will appear in the tweet. Given the character limit for each tweet, I would suggest you enter hashtags to maximize views on your updates.
- LinkedIn – Choose ‘share a link’ and edit the message that will appear with the link as you see fit. Given that LinkedIn is more of a professional network, tailor your message for that demographic.
With the guide above on how to use IFTTT, you’re still not done! There are still lots of other sites that you can test (i.e. Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, etc.) to reach your blog’s target audience. When all’s said and done, you can expect hours saved on promoting your blog content through social media, freeing you up to focus on either content marketing or developing more blog post ideas.
Images: ”Social media/Shutterstock.com“
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