Promotion is a huge part of blogging success.
There are many ways to promote blog posts and your brand in general. One of the major ones is social media.
Millions of people use social media every day. That’s a large group of potential customers and many social networks have become advanced to the point where marketers can target specific segments within the networks.
At GBW, we see social media as one of the ways for businesses to grow and supplement a content strategy.
The way we do it is nothing special or unique, but it is very effective. We actually think it might be the simple nature of the strategy that makes it so effective.
We call it The Snippet Strategy.
The Snippet Strategy for Business Blogging Promotion
Here is the basic idea of The Snippet Strategy.
You write a blog post that probably averages about 500-600 words. You’ll address a main topic with a few sub-topics. Within that post you’ll naturally have a few interesting snippets that would make for good tweets and posts on sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+.
People on social networks love short content. It’s for this reason that The Snippet Strategy works.
For every post you create look to create about 3-5 snippets that will make for great shares on social media.
The strategy we use with our own blog and with clients blogs is to make sure we share the post on social media via the post title and link. We can usually set this up automatically with no effort. When the post publishes the post is shared.
We’ll also re-share posts via the title and the link at various points in the future after the post is published.
We’ll also take about 3-5 snippets from within the post and share those from time to time on social media. Sometimes we’ll include the links and other times we won’t.
We try to entice people with shares that include the links and with the others we just try to share interesting, useful information.
The simplicity of the strategy is that you’re providing interesting, useful content on social media. Beyond anything else this is what grows your social presence.
And the great thing is that you’re sharing what you already have on your blog. You know the topics well. You own the content on the blog so you’ll always have it instead of losing it in the busy streams on social media.
I’ll leave you with an example from the GBW archives.
Post: Analyzing The FreshBooks Blogging Strategy
Snippet #1: The blog posts on FreshBooks target a very specific audience.
Snippet #2: FreshBooks uses a very popular and effective blogging strategy. See it here…
Snippet #3: FreshBooks uses series posts to keep blog readers coming back again and again.
Snippet #4: FreshBooks doesn’t always talk about their product. They help their target customers with useful content.
Snippet #5: After looking at the FreshBooks blog I would say one thing – keep your title tags short.
Image: WayTru