The Best Social Media Platforms to Promote Your Blog
When you are trying to spread the word about your blog and attract regular readers, you might get overwhelmed by the number of social media platforms to use to promote your blog. Don’t worry – you can start with the platforms you are most familiar with, and gradually expand your reach. Here are a few social media networks to start with.
RSS feed
Though RSS is technically not a social media platform, many RSS readers (like Google Reader) are becoming more social and suggesting blogs to users based on their preferences. Publishing your blog posts to RSS also allows you to automate posting to a number of sites using tools or plugins. Many content management systems create RSS feeds automatically, but you can also create an RSS feed through a service like Feedburner.
Many bloggers use Twitter as an extended RSS feed, both notifying readers of new posts and engaging in conversations. Though this can be automated, responses can be better if you vary the format of tweets about your blog, instead of simply posting the post’s title and a link. Many people recommend asking a related question along with a link.
At first glance, Facebook is used in a similar way as Twitter. However, there are some important differences. Facebook’s format encourages users to click on links with multimedia content, so posting videos or linking to blog posts with images can be very effective.
Instead of promoting your blog from your personal account, create a fan page for your blog itself. This prevents you from reaching your 5,000 friend limit and allows a focused channel for all blog-related or business-related discussions.
Social bookmarking
StumbleUpon, Delicious, and other social bookmarking sites allow people to search what others have favorited. It is important that posts bookmarked on one of these sites are associated with appropriate keywords, categories, and have well-written descriptions.
Though it can be useful to have your site’s posts categorized by these services, you lose credibility as a source if you only bookmark links to your own site. To foster more of a community, be sure to post other relevant links as well.
Digg
Though Digg is similar to some social bookmarking sites, whoever is the first person to add a post to Digg can add a description, but after that, people simply vote a page up or down and add comments. Like bookmarking sites, Digg will penalize a user if they are only adding their own site’s posts. Digg users are generally more respecting of a link coming from more involved Digg users.
Email Subscriptions
Though many people now use social media networks, a number of people still enjoy receiving email updates for blog posts. Though email is not a new social media avenue, readers can still share their favorite posts by forwarding interesting or useful posts to their friends and contacts. When offering email subscriptions to your blog, make sure that the header and footer make it clear where the content is coming from, so that users receiving the emails will not be confused about the origin of the information, and will be able to click through and read the post online. You can even include a comment in the footer making it clear that recipients are encouraged to forward and spread the information.
Other sites
A number of plugins allow users to submit their favorite posts to any number of social media networks, up to dozens or hundreds of them. Some say that so many options do not offer a clear call to action and can lead to a scattered network of readers. Others point out that users who are loyal to particular social media sites are unlikely to change loyalties based on one blog.
Experiment, and find out which avenues are the best for your site. If you are attracting a significant amount of traffic from a particular site, connect to that site to understand its culture and users better and foster the relationships that began with your blog.
Being flexible is one of the keys to promoting your blog using social media. Are there any situations that you have faced forcing you to be flexible with your blog or readers?
Author Info
Written by Ralph Matlack
Ralph Matlack is a Group Product Manager in Intuit’s Grow Your Business division where he leads the strategy and development of the Intuit Websites offering. Having founded and run two bootstrap startups prior to Intuit, he also has a first-hand appreciation of the challenging part-salesperson, part-accountant, part-human resources, part-janitor roles that small business owners have. He loves golf, beer, college football, and summer trips to Sweden with his family. You can follow Ralph on Twitter at @rematlack.
Just where is the facebook like button ?
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