The link between business blogs and social media is fairly straightforward to most businesses: publish a post and then promote it via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.
While there’s clearly nothing wrong with such a strategy, promoting corporate blog activity only after posts have been published runs the risk of limiting exposure and reach. The ideal strategy strikes the perfect balance between being well-planned, yet also opportunistic.
As a guide, prolific social media and content commentator Lee Odden suggests that in order to effectively scale blog promotion efforts, around two to three times as much work should go into growing social networks as goes into linking content to them.
Building social networks can seem like a constant and largely uphill struggle, yet without this activity even the most ardently planned editorial calendar can fall foul of online invisibility.
With its content calendar established, a business then needs to consider outreach activity on the core five social networks: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest. If the corporate blog publishes a significant amount of video content, then YouTube is a logical addition to bolster a video SEO strategy
Investment is key for ROI on blog promotion activity. Remember the old adage ‘write it and they will come’? It’s not true. Publishing even the most relevant and interesting content isn’t enough without promotion. And promotion itself is futile without an interested audience to receive it. Make network growth an early priority within your business blog strategy with a few simple steps.
How to promote business blogs via social media:
1) Curate interesting content and interact with others once it’s published. Google News is a useful starting point.
2) Use a tool such as HootSuite to keep tabs on all social communities and monitor topics of relevance that encourage interactions.
3) Create lists of influential Twitter users in your sector and follow that list within HootSuite for engagement opportunities.
4) Comment and interact on other relevant blogs to create a credible footprint within your niche online community.
5) Deliver a core message and takeaway with each blog post, crafted to appeal to your target audience’s needs. Be very specific with this (for example, use a title like ’10 ways to publish a marketing e-book’ rather than ’10 ways to get published’).
As you start to get more creative with your business blog posts, the potential for promotional activity often increases. Images, embeddable media like Slideshare presentations or video offer opportunities to promote posts on YouTube, Pinterest or Flickr, along with bountiful content repurposing opportunities to attract further traffic back to the original blog post.
Daunting though blog promotional activity can seem, in many cases just sticking to two or three of the suggestions mentioned here can vastly improve the exposure and visibility of blog content.
How do you use promotional activity on social to support your business blog?
Photo: Nan Palmero
