How to promote your blog posts on social media

In the morning, around 8 am, I promote my blog posts on Facebook. Do you know what happens, 30 minutes later? I have about 30 more users who have visited my blog. During the day, it can reach up to 150-200 unique visitors. The days when I don’t do this, I have a significantly less visitors on my blog!

This is where we realize the significant impact that social networks can have on our blog. In June, I published an article that gives tips on how to get more followers on Instagram. During the week, I promoted it on Facebook, as usual. Except for this time, my publication became viral on a Facebook group. This day has completely changed my opinion on Facebook group!

Today, I want to summarize all my tips on how you can promote articles on social media. Not just on Facebook, but on all others except Google +, which I do not use.

Choose your social media

There are only 24 hours in a day. We must make choices! My choices are to focus on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I just started using Pinterest more seriously. I advise you to do the same thing. Choose a few social networks with which you are most comfortable to start, then explore others later.

We can not control everything 100% at the same time! 😉

This article contains affiliate links. This doesn’t cost you anything, but I can earn a small commission if you buy something or sign up on a website. This helps me to maintain the blog. My full disclosure is here.

How to promote your blog posts on

Facebook

Personal profile

• Promote your blog at the five places possible
  Click here to know how you can do that. Your blog is never put forward enough! 😉

• From time to time, share your articles via your page.
  I don’t advise you to do it every week to avoid annoying your friends (but that’s my opinion). I prefer to keep a small limit on my profile and my blog / my promotion. Anyway, I invited all my friends to like my Facebook page, so if they want to follow me, they can do it on my page! The reason why I share the publication of my page to my wall so that those who want it can have another opportunity to love my Facebook page! Lately, Facebook has been lowering the reach of Facebook pages, so using your profile to reach more people is a great alternative.
  

Your professional Facebook page

• Schedule promotion of your articles directly to your page
  It’s not the most visual way in the world, in the sense that a calendar view is not available, but I find that the new tool for planning publications directly to Facebook does the job very well. When our publications are published, we even receive a notification to let us know. Very pleasant! I promote my articles once a month, so I promote items that are not seasonal several times. I space my publications of 2-3 days. Why? Because I have 1000 mentions I like on my Facebook page, and yet I reach about 100 to 200 people with each publication. Sometimes less. So I tell myself that the probability that the same person will see the same article twice, and remember that he saw it the least before … is very weak! It also allows me to keep my Facebook page always powered.
  
  

Facebook groups

The introduction to this article was entirely dedicated to Facebook groups. Do you understand how much I love Facebook groups ?! My tip is to promote your blog posts regularly!

• Promote your blog posts every day in Facebook groups 
  However, depending on the day of the week, change groups! Some of them only allow promotion on specific days of the week, such as Monday. Others allow advertising every day. Check out my list of French and English Facebook groups.

• Use Todoist (or a task manager) to remind you when to publish where
  Why? To ensure that you always follow the rules in force in the groups. Also, this will allow you never to forget to promote yourself. My guide here. It’s also very fast since each task contains a link to the group in question. I only have to click on the title of the task to go to the group where I have to do my promotion!

• Analyze if Facebook Groups are bringing visitors to your blog
  I found this method to be able to see directly in Google Analytics how many visitors a group gives me. It helps to make sure I’m not losing my time promoting on a group that doesn’t have any return on investment. Read this blog post to learn how I do this.

I hope this image convinced you! 1200 visits from only one group, not bad, right? 🙂

With my Todoist template, it only takes me 15 minutes per day! Easy!

Twitter

• Schedule tweets to promote your posts 
  I tried Buffer and Hootsuite to do this work, but I wasn’t satisfied. The first one had a 10 tweets limit for the free plan, and Hootsuite is OK, but has a bad user interface and doesn’t let us schedule recurrent tweets. That’s why I now schedule my tweets on Google Calendar. I also wrote a complete blog post on how I do it so you can do the same! 

• What is the best time to tweet? 
  This is a great question! I use my judgment to do so. When do I go on Twitter? Also, I publish at many different times of the day and any day. Why not? Timezones are a thing! 😉

• How many tweets should I post per day?
  As you can see in the screenshot above, I tweet 2 or 3 times per day. It’s only tweets where I promote my posts; I think it’s a great number. A lot of blog posts that I read about this subject suggests publishing 8-9 tweets per day, every day. However, we shouldn’t only promote our posts; we have to vary: share posts of other blogs retweets other people, write spontaneous tweets, reply to people, etc.

Instagram

• Create a story with a swipe up  
  A “swipe up” means that when people take their finger and swipe up on a story, they will be redirected to a specified link. You have access to this option when you have a business account and at least 10k followers. Here is a screenshot of what it looks like:

• Create a recurring task in a tool like Todoist to remind you to promote your blog!
  I have 3 recurring tasks related to my Instagram account:
  1- Promote my blog
  2- Promote my newsletter
  3- Promote my Facebook group for women in technology

These three tasks are repeated every 3 days, and I usually don’t do them on the same day. Even if you do not have the option to “swipe up” on Instagram, you can still create a story and promote what you want and keep a link in your biography.

• Link to your blog in your bio
  Some people put the link to their last article in their biography. Personally, I always leave the direct address of my blog. I believe people will be able to read the article of their choice in this way, and they are more likely to find an article that interests them via the home page and stay on my blog longer than if I force them to go to my last article. I also think it looks better on my profile!
  
  

• Use LinkTree if you want to promote multiple links on your profile
  Linktree is a website that you can use to promote various of your links. If you use it though, make sure to make these changes to your Google Analytics account. Otherwise, your visits to your blog from Instagram won’t count as Instagram visitors, they will be coming from the Linktree website.

• Mention to your subscribers in your captions that you have a new article
  For example, you can post a photo that relates to your last article, and use the legend to talk about it a bit, and then say that if they want more information, for example, they can read your last article on the subject!

Pinterest

I’m still a newbie to Pinterest, so some of you might have better tips than I can provide for now, but here’s what I’m doing so far:

• Schedule pins with Tailwind
  I love automating, as you may have noticed in my articles! Pinterest can take a lot of time or investment if you do not use tools like Tailwind. So I decided to invest money to sit in front of the television, listen to a TV show, and plan all my pins for the month in a couple of hours 🙂 

Try Tailwind for free with their free trial – no credit card required!! 

• Create portrait images for all your blog posts 
  I create portraits images that all have the same “branding.” This allows people to quickly recognize my articles when they are browsing on Pinterest. It’s also way faster to create the images if they all look similar!  I use Canva to do that.

Reddit

Reddit is like a forum website where people can post links and create discussions on various subjects, which we called subreddits. Each subreddit has a different topic, and different rules too! It is important to always read the rules of each subreddits before promoting them.

I also automate mu promotion on these subreddits with IFTTT. I wrote a blog post about it. However, it’s not perfect, so IFTTT will promote your blog posts randomly in the subreddits of its choice every time you publish a new blog post. That’s good enough for me since I don’t have to do anything.

• Here are the subreddits where I promote my blog posts
  • /r/blogging: You can promote your blog posts in the “check out my blog post” thread. Also, if a member asks a question and you have a blog post and provide an answer for it, you can also promote it.
  • /r/BlockExchange
  • /r/TellThePeople
  • /r/BlogSwap
  • /r/AnythingGoesBlog
  • /r/shamelessplug
  • /r/blogs
  • /r/BlogDiscovery
  • /r/BlogBuildTips

Quora

I just started out using Quora. It is a Q & A site, so people ask questions and those who are knowledgeable can answer them. There are many discussion categories available. I like answering people’s questions, so this is a website that I like: here is my profile!

I didn’t know how Quora worked at first, what is the “advertising limit” accepted in our responses. Finally, we can say a lot about anything we want. Normally, what I’m doing is simply answering questions that I can, and if I have a blog post written that answers that question, I’ll add something like “If you want to know more, read my blog post about xxx” with a link to the blog post.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn was easy until now because I didn’t use it that much and just automated my publications on that social network using IFTTT.

• Automatically publish new articles on LinkedIn
  Already talked about this in another article, but I neglected LinkedIn for a long time. Still, it’s a professional social network, and my blog deals with topics directly related to my career. Why not share my new posts on LinkedIn ?! I don’t have time to think about doing this every week when I publish an original article, so for a while, I used to automate that with IFTTT, so it automatically shares my new blog posts on LinkedIn. Since I’m now more active on LinkedIn, I will now do it myself with a more meaningful caption.

Conclusion

Here are all the steps I do to promote my articles! What is part of your promotion routine? What do you do differently? Leave me your opinion in comments!