So you’ve written some awesome posts for your business blog — congratulations. Blogging is a great way to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry, give your business a unique voice, and strengthen customer connections. That is, if anyone sees your posts. Creating content is a wonderful thing — but you’ve also got to promote blog posts.
Just how often should you do that? Well, opinions are mixed.
How often experts promote blog posts
Some social media and blogging experts say to promote blog posts once a day; others recommend once a week; and others suggest promoting the same post several times each day.
Online business and marketing strategist Susie Romans recently hosted a webinar where she talked about how she created a blog that within less than two years managed to get more than 5 million visitors. Her blog promotion strategy? She promotes a post two to four times on Twitter and Instagram the day it goes live, then repeats the process a few times that week.
Garrett Moon, a founder at CoSchedule, recommends a consistent, repetitive social sharing strategy that starts the day of publication. He writes:
“The thing we have to realize is that the social web is a stream, and not a book. When we read a book we start at the beginning and work our way to the end. This is not the case for someone who follows a social network. On the social web, our followers will dip in and out at will – consuming a few messages at a time, and then missing out on others completely.
To truly promote your blog with social media, you need to maintain a more consistent presence. You need a social sharing schedule, a simple cascade of messages that drip to your social accounts one at a time over a period of several days, months, or even years! In short, sharing your post more than once on each network that you use."
Post a social message when your blog post goes live, Garrett says. Trickle out notices of its birth over the next two to three hours that day. Share it again the next day. Pre-schedule another series of messages to promote the blog post on your social networks the following week. The next month? You guessed it — pre-schedule and share it even more.
Spend 20 percent of your time creating blog posts and 80 percent of your time promoting them.
Derek Halpern, founder of Social Triggers, recommends taking an 80/20 approach to promote blog posts. He says your blog strategy should be 20 percent writing and publishing content and 80 percent promotion. He's been known to publish a blog post, send out a newsletter about it, and promote it seven to 10 times in a week on Twitter and three to four times on Facebook. Then he promotes the post again after people have forgotten about it.
My take on the matter
So everyone agrees that you need to share the heck out of your blog goodies — but there don't appear to be any clear-cut guidelines as to how often exactly. With this in mind, you might be wondering, what is my take on the matter?
I think you should share a blog post until it's not relevant, you are sick of it, or your readers tell you they are sick of it.
Let me explain.
Potential readers who have never heard of you aren't looking for your blog posts. Sorry, friend, but with millions of blogs out there you have to accept that it isn’t easy to cut through the noise. Unless you are sharing your posts with sexy and/or trending hashtags and I-must-click-on-this-link headlines, odds are you won't get unique visitors.
If you post it once on your various social media handles and then never mention it again, your blog is likely to go up in smoke with your dreams of blogger greatness.
You have to keep reviving your blog's interest and relevance — and the way you do that is by sharing it often on the social networks where your potential readers hang out.
If you feel like you're promoting the same blog post too often, write a new one and then promote it like crazy. Then, write another one and promote it like crazy. After that? Rinse and repeat until you have an archive of blog posts that you’re continually promoting to give your new and potential readers what appears to be fresh and interesting content.
Tips for cross-social promotion
Each of your social media pages might be reaching a different audience, so don't be afraid to post across all of them. Here are some things to consider based on the type of platform:
When sharing on LinkedIn: Don't post too much and be careful posting the same link in too many groups. This is a quick way to be banned from one or even all of them. Also, do yourself a favor and make sure that you are only posting your link in relevant groups. It's unlikely you'll find a lot of fans for your model car blog in the nurses groups.
Pinterest: Rich images convert best from Pinterest since an image is the first thing a Pinterest user will see. Here are some tips for styling pictures on Pinterest.
Twitter: If you're on Twitter and expect anyone to click your link, think of your hashtags as the keywords people search for specific content.
Instagram: Videos and rich images will do you good here, but don't forget your links will not be clickable. Therefore, if you're using Instagram, make sure you have a search box on your blog so that people can quickly find the keywords you discussed in your blog promo.
Facebook: The moment your link shows up too many times by your own hand, Facebook can flag it as spam. That’s why it’s probably best only to promote blog posts on Facebook as you publish them, and wait two weeks to a month before posting the same link again. In between, post about other content of interest to your Facebook followers.
Encourage your readers to share
A great way to avoid feeling like you are sharing your content too frequently is to ask your readers to share it on their social media feeds. At the end of each blog post, mention that you would appreciate a “like” and a share. Encourage retweets and Facebook shares. There is no harm in asking loyal followers to do the dirty work for you!
Of course, this is all the more reason to create stellar content on your blog.
If you feel as though you are beating a dead horse, odds are that you are. Let the horse rest in peace, at least until we've had time to forget the horse died in the first place. Then, by all means, remind us how wonderful it felt when we took it for a ride.
