Promoting your blog post on social media

Hey bloggers! We’ve made it to Part 3 of our six-part series on how to start a successful WordPress blog! If you haven’t already, please read the first two articles in our series, including the posts about the Technical Requirements you need to fill when writing your first post and the second post about Previewing/Scheduling your first post.

Today, our message is short but sweet and has to do with how to post to social media in order to get maximum exposure you’re after.

How to: After you’ve published your post, copy the published URL and post to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, YouTube and any other relevant social media channels just as you would any other link. Additionally, add it to your own personal page and encourage others to share. Tag companies, groups or other parties if relevant to the article to really stir up some excitement about your post. Wonder when you should post? In this study by Track Maven, we read that blog posts published at 3 p.m. EST receive the highest number of social shares on average, so we have recently played around with sharing in the afternoon as of late. In a study by Noah over at AppSumo, the team found that posts published on Tuesday had the best chance of going viral. We encourage you to do some A/B testing of your own and see what works!

Schedule out your blog post: You’ve put time into your blog post, so squeeze all the value you can out of it by making sure your audience sees it! Do this by posting your blog post on social media multiple times, which will give your audience more opportunity to view it. We love social media management tools like Coschedule and Buffer, which make scheduling out future blog posts really simple. We suggest posting about your new blog post at least twelve times over the course of the next month. We follow this schedule as suggested by Coschedule.

Up the ante: Now that you’re getting in there and scheduling out your posts, take the time to make sure they sound as enticing and look as engaging as possible. Vary up your language and use imagery to draw the eye to content. As designers, we love sharing imagery along with our posts and suggest you do the same.

Some tips here:

• When introducing your post, use emotion to drive attention to the URL, share quotes or snippets from the content, or cite an interesting fact to mix it up a bit.
• Use imagery to draw the eye to content. As designers, we love sharing imagery along with our posts and suggest you do the same. Facebook makes this easy, so be sure to take advantage of the image previews they suggest to you. Buffer also makes image sharing easy. Definitely give them a shot.

Use hashtags. Use industry relevant hashtags when posting on social media. Quicksprout recommends up to three. If you’re a designer as well, here are some we recommend.

Good luck, happy posting and we’ll see you in part four!