Respected marketing expert Jay Baer once said, “Content is fire, social media is gasoline.” We couldn’t agree more.
If you are on social media and have a blog, have you combined your blogging with your social media marketing? The fact is there is a very close relationship between content, social media, and search engine optimisation. The marketing industry often discusses these strategies independently. However, each helps to enhance and grow the others.
Here is how the cycle can work for you. Your social media marketing will help grow your audience and identify leads. When you share your blog content, this helps to identify you as an expert and authoritative. As your followers engage with your content, these social signals are used by search engines to identify your content as reliable and popular, and increases your domain authority. This then improves your position in organic search results. The higher ranking increases traffic from search engines, and your quality content attracts new subscribers and followers.
Ultimately, social media marketing and blogging will work best when they work together. That’s why we have these recommendations to enhance your social media using your blog:
1. Share Blog Entries on Social Media
Sharing your blog posts on social media helps resolves one of the biggest questions businesses have, “What should we share?” Moreover, this provides your followers with relevant and helpful information, while driving traffic to your website. Many marketing experts recommend limiting self-promotion on social media to roughly 20 percent. Constantly promoting products and services can cause followers to tune you out. Therefore, blog content gives them something interesting to engage with.
2. Include Social Sharing Tools
You want to make it easy for your website visitors to share your content with their networks. The most common way to do this is with social sharing buttons on each page. However, there are other ways to integrate social sharing like adding tweetable quotes with the Clicktotweet tool. The more visitors that share your blog, the more you expand your organic reach and grow your website popularity. Both potential customers and search engines use this social proof to measure your reliability and authority.
3. Use Blogging to Grow Social Followers
If you are looking to grow your social media networks, one of the best ways to find relevant followers is by encouraging your blog visitors to follow your accounts. Moreover, when you share your quality blog content socially, you attract followers looking for that information. However, the key here is creating content that is useful, valuable, and relevant to your ideal customer. If the content is weak, thin, or simply for delivering a message of “buy now” then you will have difficulty growing an audience and building the trust needed to earn a sale.
4. Boost Social Advertising
There are many companies who have tried paid advertising on social media platforms and it did not work as well as expected. Users need a reason to engage and self-promotion tends to have a limited and sometimes negative effect. If you are directing your social media advertising to your main page, products or service pages and not receiving click-throughs, try promoting your blog content. Once on the site, use an on-page call to action for conversations.
We really see social media as fuel for the blog content fire that can accelerate your reach and growth. Combining them just makes sense.