The Top 6 Ways to Promote Your Business Blog on Social Media

What does every business blog need to successfully generate leads? Useful content? Yes. Calls-to-action? Yes. Optimization for the keywords your target marketing are searching? Yes.

Even more importantly, your business blog needs readers. Without readers, there can be no leads.

And while many readers will find your blog by searching for those keywords and being drawn in by your useful content, you can also find new readers and remind repeat readers to come back by promoting your blog through social media. Failing to do so is one of the 15 Business Blogging Mistakes we don’t want you to make.

Here are the six top steps to promoting your business blog on social media.

1. Create a social media presence

I know, it sounds obvious, but not quite everyone has caught on. If you have a business, you will almost inevitably need to have some social media presence - Facebook is the first place many people go now to find information about businesses and organizations.

A social media presence is even more essential if your target audience is under the age of 30. 90% of young adults—ages 18 to 29—use social media (compared to just 35% of those over age 65). Fully a third of millennials say social media is one of their preferred channels for communicating with businesses. (Click to Tweet)

(Source)

Remember that even if those young people aren’t your target market today, in a few more years, they likely will.

You don’t have to jump into all of the social media platforms at once, but start with the most popular—Facebook and Twitter, plus LinkedIn if your company is a B2B enterprise—and then consider what others may be a good fit. Here are some stats about the current top contenders to consider.

2. Expand your social media reach

Promoting blog posts on social media will only be helpful if your social media has an adequate reach. That means building a following by encouraging your customers, your employees, and everyone you meet to follow your accounts.

A few of the basic steps you should follow include adding your social media accounts to nearly every outgoing communication: emails, all pages of your website, business cards and even other printed materials.

As you gain followers, use engaging content such as games to encourage current followers to invite their friends to join in.

And always be responsive and interactive. Remember that social media platforms are at their heart a two-way conversation. Don’t just expect your customers to follow you; find similar or complementary businesses and follow them as well. Then share content that your target market will love to see.

JONES partner HubSpot rounded up a wealth of great suggestions for expanding your reach further in this blog post.

3. Share links to your business blog on social media

Many blog hosting tools, such as those offered by HubSpot make it practically seamless to automatically promote each new blog post on your social media networks as soon as they are published. Remember that on many sites, posts with images generate more traffic and are shared more often.

And don’t only share the link once. The half-life of a social media post is relatively short, especially on the fastest-moving networks such as Twitter. Use a calendar like our Social Media Scheduling Worksheet to plan and write tweets and status updates that will share your new blog posts again at specific intervals, such as 1 day, 3 days, 1 week and 3 weeks after the initial publication.

4. Make social media sharing easy

You don’t need to be the only one sharing your blog posts on social media. Make it easy for your readers to share your posts with their own networks, also, by including one-click sharing icons on your blog page. Your readers can be powerful evangelists for your content and greatly expand your reach.

Want your blog posts to be ones readers want to tell others about? Check out these five ways to make your content share-worthy.

5. Give new life to your archives

Have you been publishing a blog for a while now? Then go back through your archives and find the evergreen material that is still useful and relevant, and give it a boost by sharing it on social media again.

Chances are you have followers who missed seeing it the first time around due to the restrictive algorithms used by many social networks in choosing what appears in users’ feeds. Even more followers have also joined your networks since those older blog posts were published, also, and will see that material for the first time.

HubSpot says that 76 percent of its monthly blog views come from blog posts more than a month old. (Source) Who says only new content matters?

6. Consider promoting your blog with paid social media

As many social media networks are being more selective and restrictive regarding how posts appear in users’ news feeds when they haven’t specifically requested to “see all” from your account, it is worth exploring how paid promotion may be combined with your organic social network reach.

Some platforms, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, will allow you to target ads to specific audiences, so that you can focus your attention and budget on the individual customer personas most likely to be interested in the topic of a specific blog post.

Once you have social media promotion under control for your business blog, check through the other 14 errors that could be limiting your lead generation opportunities and find out how to blog better. Download 15 Business Blogging Mistakes and Easy Fixes to improve your inbound marketing efforts now.