How to Promote Your Blog on Social Media: 8 Tips

Building your blog from the ground up takes dedication. You need to target a niche, learn how to create valuable content, and study SEO best practices to build a site that meets your goals. Having a blog full of interesting, engaging posts and effective SEO is an accomplishment. You should be proud of yourself.

Now it’s time to take the next step: promoting your blog. In many ways, this requires an entirely different skillset from the techniques you honed when you created your blog.

Learning how to promote your blog on social media requires an active investment of time; after all, social media never sits still, so you need to keep up with it. According to social media expert Neil Patel, the average social media post has a much shorter lifespan than even the most topical blog post.

Yet social media has also proven to be one of the best ways to promote all types of blogs and websites. Taking the time to learn how to promote your blog on social media can help you access a wider circle of readers and take your blog to the next level.

There are several best practices you can follow to make the most of your social media presence in promoting your blog. In this article, you’ll find:

• the benefits of using social media for blog promotion
• tips on how to use social media to promote your blog effectively
• examples of how other people have done so

Ready to learn more? Let’s get started.

The Top Benefits of Promoting Your Blog on Social Media

There’s a reason why social media has become one of the most popular marketing tools in the world: It works. Unlike other marketing formats like commercials and display ads, people actively seek out social media. That makes it a great way to find an audience that not only tolerates your promotions but actively engages with them.

That’s not all, though. Below are three other benefits of using social media for your blog.

Low Cost

Cost is a significant factor to consider in marketing and promotions. Social media allows you to reach an audience of interested fans for the low cost of free.

Of course, you can pay for advertisements, promoted posts, or external tools to help organize your social media presence. But at its core, social media is a free tool that any blogger can use to get their site more traffic.

Simple Implementation

Just as social media is free to use, it’s also easy to start. You can create accounts on Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube with the click of a button—and it’s not much harder to build a Facebook page or group. Similarly, connecting with people who may be interested in your blog is as simple as discovering which social media platforms and hashtags your target audience uses.

Wide Reach

Social media is just that: social. These platforms are built to allow people to share content with others. They have algorithms in place to show people the content that’s most likely to interest them first.

If you have a post take off on Facebook or Twitter, it could find its way in front of thousands of potential audience members. That’s an impressive return on an investment of nothing but your time and effort.

8 Best Practices to Promote Your Blog on Social Media

The simplest way to use social media to boost your blog is to share posts whenever they are published. While this is effective, there’s so much more you can do. These eight practices can help you share posts on social media—and convince other people to share them, as well.

1. Make Posts Easy to Share

Before you even create your blog’s social media accounts, there’s a straightforward trick to help boost your blog: Make it shareable. Most blogging platforms and site themes make it easy to include buttons that encourage people to share your posts on social media.

Don’t go overboard, though. It’s better to offer just a few buttons for the social media platforms you track or have a presence in, as in the example above. This keeps your blog looking clean and doesn’t distract the reader. Facebook and Twitter are excellent choices for blogs of all types, while Pinterest and Instagram are good options for image-heavy blogs.

2. Use Images Strategically

Speaking of images, using pictures can help boost the number of people who like and share your social media posts. The first picture you use in your post will often be picked up automatically by social media platforms when you or others share it. Using something eye-catching and exciting can help encourage people to engage with the link.

These are the recipes our food staff turned to time and time again in 2020. https://t.co/bkDOFn10jL

— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 19, 2020

Including relevant images or graphics, often as a featured image on your content management system, makes your posts’ topics clearer to your potential audience—like the example from The New York Times above.

According to a study done by eMarketer, posts with pictures receive an impressive 87% of all shares on Facebook. When it comes to getting organic engagement on a post, good images are a simple way to get the job done.

3. Schedule Posts in Advance

Scheduling your content in advance might seem to go against the spontaneous nature of social media, but it has some surprising benefits. You plan your blog posts and you may even schedule them to release when you’re away from your computer. Why should social media be any different?

When you schedule your social media posts, you harness an effect known as social timing. People aren’t on Facebook all day, every day—although it may seem like they are.

Different social media platforms experience ebbs and flows, just like every other aspect of life. Every platform has its peak times and days—and you need to take advantage of this knowledge. Scheduling a tweet to go out when people are most active on Twitter helps you get as many eyes on the post as possible before newer content pushes it off people’s timelines.

While it’s impossible to predict with 100% accuracy when a social media post will receive the most traffic, these are the generally accepted peak times for the most common platforms:

• Facebook: During workdays
• Twitter: Daytime and evening for your preferred time zones
• Instagram: Morning and afternoon for your preferred time zones
• LinkedIn: During business days
• Pinterest: Evenings and weekends

None of these is accurate all of the time. You can try using tools like Facebook Analytics, Iconosquare, or Tweriod to analyze when your followers are most active—or you can investigate yourself by posting at different times of the day and checking the responses you get.

With some experimentation, you’ll find the days and times that work best to get engagement. You can schedule your posts to go out then.

4. Be Consistent

Knowing when to post is excellent, but knowing how often to post is even better.

Some breathing room is vital for keeping your audience once you’ve built up a social media following. People like to have some variety on their page. Seeing too many of your posts can become irritating. Posting a dozen things on Facebook or Instagram on one day and then ignoring the platforms for a week is not a good way to keep people engaged.

Here are some post frequency rules for social media posts:

• Facebook: Once or twice a day
• Twitter: Up to five times daily for maximum engagement
• Instagram: Anywhere from weekly to 10 times a day
• LinkedIn: Several times a week
• Pinterest: Three to 30 times a day

Following the schedules above only works if you can keep it up in the long term. It’s better to post to Instagram once a week than to post five times daily for a while and then stop. A lack of consistency loses followers and lowers your engagement numbers.

5. Include Hashtags

When learning how to promote your blog on social media, you’ll find that hashtags are essential.

Hashtags allow people to find new content about topics that interest them—from people they don’t already follow. Including a few hashtags in your social media posts can put your blog in front of people who are actively searching for that type of content and attract new followers.

Check out EarthEasy’s Instagram post below for a good example. It includes six hashtags that relate to the topic of the blog article and are placed at the bottom of the post so they don’t distract from the content.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Sustainable Living (@eartheasy)

You don’t need to use dozens of hashtags per post, either. It’s better to target one or two hashtags on Twitter and three to five on Facebook or Instagram so your post doesn’t come across as spam.

6. Build a Blogger Network

Social media is made for working together. If there are other bloggers in your niche on the same platforms you use, consider working together.

When you share your blog posts on social media, other bloggers can boost them to their followers. You can do the same for them. Retweeting, sharing, or liking each other’s content helps you build a network within your niche and access a wider following. This is especially important on platforms that put popular content at the top of people’s feeds.

More engagement with a post makes it more likely to show up for other people, leading to exponential growth for popular blogs. It also helps you provide more value for your followers. By sharing a fellow blogger’s post on a day when you didn’t publish anything, you’re giving your audience more content.

7. Take Advantage of Differences

Every social media platform is a little different. It could be a mistake to stick to just one because there’s no single platform that’s the “best” to promote blog posts. Instead, choose two or three different platforms and use their differences to your advantage.

For example: On Instagram, you can create unique graphics that fit the square and minimalist aesthetic—and encourage comments. On Facebook, where article titles are more pronounced, you can use more abstract images and focus on bringing people over to your blog. Tweaking your style to fit the platform is much more useful than trying the same approach everywhere.

8. Participate in Online Communities

Posting to social media and ignoring the platforms otherwise could have you missing some of the most significant benefits they offer. Engaging directly with your followers through social media is a valuable way to build community and your brand.

Tracking when your accounts are tagged or mentioned on social media can help you become part of the conversation. Not only does connecting this way encourage your followers to keep sharing your content and talking about you, but it also can give you ideas for new blog posts to create and post in the future.

Final Takeaways

Learning how to promote your blog on social media can be as straightforward or as complex as you want it to be. By creating informative and entertaining posts, scheduling them regularly, using hashtags, and engaging with your followers and fellow bloggers, you can amplify your blog’s reach.

If you’re looking for more resources, Compose.ly can help. For starters, check out our social media content calendar templates to keep track of what you plan to post and when. You can plan your social media content and schedule it in advance, and then relax while it takes care of itself.

Now that you’ve got all the tools and strategies you need, it’s time to apply them and start promoting your blog.

This article was written by Compose.ly writer Gabrielle Hass.