The Social Media Marketer

How To Integrate Your Blog With Your Social Media Accounts

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If you’re a savvy business owner with your ear to the ground, you can’t deny that blogging has a lot of potential to get your website traffic and your company new customers.  Perhaps you have read about the success of blogging’s early adopters, such as Pete Cashmere of Mashable.com. In 2005, Pete started writing about the technologies that he loved, and today Mashable is one of the most popular tech blogs in the entire world with 50+ MILLION pageviews every month.

Mashable is not only big in the blogosphere, it is a go-to blog for 2 million Twitter followers and a half million Facebook fans.

Now, how did he do this? Well for one thing, it took commitment and time. But a big part of the success was the millions of raving social media fans that read, loved, and shared Mashable’s content.

Let's assume that you clicked to read this post because you are already blogging (Good Work!) and you know that you need to promote the content to increase traffic. You need people to not only read your blog, you need them to love it and share it.

This blog post will give you tips about how to integrate blogging marketing with social media. To get it shared, you have to get everything integrated and streamlined – let’s talk blog and social media efficiency!

To take your great blog content and to connect with social media, here are the major considerations.

1) Re-purpose your Blog Content into Numerous Social Media Posts

2) Make It Easy for People To Share Your Posts

Re-purpose Your Blog Content into Engaging Social Media Posts

A 500 word blog article is great fodder for social media. See how many engaging posts you can pull from that one article.

-          Pull out main points, bullet points, and create questions about the main discussion topics. Take small points and make them engaging and different, but all related to the blog article. When you post these, include a link to the blog post.

-          This is better than an automatic RSS feed, as that just posts out the blog post as a whole with no intro or engaging headline.  People aren’t going to follow a link just because you say it’s an interesting post – give them something to entice them and wanting more!

-          Create slightly different content for different platforms – on Facebook you can have more information and attach links so they are presented well. On Twitter, stick with the 140 word count so it doesn’t get cut off.

-          Post a snippet of the blog post in your favorite LinkedIn discussion groups – and ask an engaging question. When people answer the question, be there to respond and be engaged.

Make It Easy for People To Share Your Post

Mitch Joel, the author of Six Pixels of Separation, and his blog of the same name said that “many people think that Social Media is all about the conversation and engaging in the conversation. I believe that what makes any media “social” is the ability to share it.”

But nothing is social unless it is worth sharing it and easy to do. The ultimate goal of business marketing with social media is to get in front of new people that don’t know about you yet, and turn them into raving fans (customers). Here are some easy to implement tips on how to make it easy and worth it:

• Publish as frequently as possible

• Marketing with Social Media means that you need to stay involved and engaged.

• Search engines will index more frequently, and people are more apt to become regular blog visitors

• Add retweet buttons, +1 and share buttons to posts.

• There are many plug-ins and add-ons to add buttons to your blog that make it easy for readers to share your content on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc. Find the style that suits you and add it to the footer of your blog posts.

• Write great headlines

• This is important because as it is shared this may be the only part people see before clicking the link

• Promote the post on various channels

• Send an email broadcast

• Allow people to have new posts emailed to them

• Add blog link to your email signature

• Comment on blogs in your industry with a link back to your blog

• Set up your personal and business profiles on Google – include links to blog posts and website.

The hardest about blogging is getting started. If you're already doing that, be creative about how to bring great traffic and engagement by marketing with social media.