For the first quarter of 2014 I’ve been using Buffer for my social media strategy.
The results have been great. Traffic to the Ghost Blog Writers website has been up dramatically and the sources have mainly been Twitter and LinkedIn with more from Google+ and a few other places.
Not only has traffic increased from social networks, but people seem to be linking to the articles more from their own websites and blogs. Some, probably not all, is a result of more people discovering GBW on social media.
This increase in social media traffic has evened out the sources of traffic to the site, which is a good thing. Organic traffic from Google and other search engines are good, but you never want to becoming too dependent on traffic from any source and it’s especially easy to become dependent on organic search or SEO traffic.
We don’t really control what Google or the social media sites are doing so evening out your traffic sources and skewing it to direct sources and email are ideal.
Okay, so Buffer has been great, but I’ve heard a few times that people are seeing the same or similar social updates on my accounts. It seems to be a minority, but the rumblings are there.
It was a purposeful effort to increase sharing on social media and to share information from multiple posts different times. The idea is that a really great blog post deserves to be shared more than once. If you’re sharing something on a social media feed there are only so many people looking at their feed at that moment in time. If they follow a good number of people they’re going to miss what you shared. So why not share the same thing multiple times to catch more of your followers when they check their feeds?
However, I do think it’s important to keep things fresh and I go back to a post I wrote about sharing 20 snippets for every 1 blog post.
Going forward I’m going to try a few new things to keep social media content fresh. Here are the steps I’m going to take.
Step 1 – Stick To The Snippet Formula
The Snippet Formula with creating 20 snippets for every 1 post works. It’s just easy to sometimes get caught sharing the same type of social media update. Sticking to the formula of using variations of the title, quotes and other text from the post can give you a number of different things to share on social media.
Step 2 – Add More Personal Touches To Twitter
I think it’s good to have a little personality on social media. It’s is social media after all. This means a few more posts about golf and other things I enjoy doing. It’s more personal and it’s mixed in with blogging and business, but that’s okay. It’s good to give people a little peek inside your life and it adds in some different and fresh content.
Step 3 – Share More Social Media-Only Content
I check Twitter throughout the day. I follow a select few on Twitter, but the ones I do follow share the kind of information that I’m looking for. They’re my trusted sources on various topics. One thing I notice is that nearly all publish their own material on their own sites (or sites that pay them), but they also publish Twitter-only content. I want to add more of this content to my feed so not everything includes a link.
I hope that helps with your social media updates if you’re suffering from the sameness that can sometimes creep in. It might take a little extra effort, but with apps like Buffer to help it becomes much easier.