So, you have a new piece of content you have just published. Time to fire up all of your social media accounts and send out a link, and enjoy that nice wave of traffic that comes when you put something out there. This is social media marketing 101, and something you are probably already in the habit of doing. However, what do you do next?
Many content writers and blog owners tend to think that once those first links have been sent out, they have done their social media promotion and reached everybody they can reach using their social network accounts. They basically ‘fire and forget’, and the next time they send out links to their own stuff will be when they have a new piece of content published. This strategy actually wastes a lot of the potential there is to get readers using social networks.
Why ‘Fire and Forget’ Isn’t the Best Approach
It is important to consider the behaviour of social media users. On Twitter, which is one of the best networks there is for promoting content, most users follow hundreds or even thousands of accounts, and there is no way they see every tweet on their news feed. Even if you check Twitter regularly throughout the day, you probably aren’t going to scroll back to see literally everything since your last visit. On Facebook, you may look at more of the things you see posted, but you probably don’t click on every link you see, even if you find it interesting. You may think you’d like to look at it later, but right now you are just on there to chat or update your status. In short, not everybody who would potentially like to see your content will see it if you only share it once on initial publication.
So What Is a Better Approach?
It seems logical in light of this that you should share your content more than once, but what is a good plan for when and how?
Say you are using four social networks – Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and G+. When you publish your content, you immediately share on all of them, as is normal. For the rest of the day, share again on Twitter every few hours (you may want to tweet other things in between so your timeline doesn’t look spammy). Twitter is the network where there is the highest amount of ‘noise’, so this approach will get you an optimal amount of views without annoying your followers with constant shares of the same link. The following day, share again on all of the networks for those who might have missed it. After a week, share it again, unless it was topical and is now out of date. You can then keep sharing on a monthly basis if you want, for as long as the content is still valuable. Doing this with all your content means you end up with a great cycle of things you are always promoting.
If you are looking for great content to share to help promote your blog or website, get in touch with us today!
