How to Effectively Share Your Blog Posts on Social Media Sites

Writing and publishing blog posts often and consistently goes a long way toward helping your blog get discovered, but it’s not enough. To drive traffic to your site, so you gain followers and subscribers, you need to share your posts on social networks. That’s how you “tell” potential readers of your blog and your blogged book that your site exists.

More often than not, this is where newbie bloggers and book bloggers fall down on the job. Either they don’t want to get involved in social networks, or they think promoting their posts in this manner is too time consuming or too salesy. Sometimes even seasoned bloggers fail to promote posts on social networks. Instead, they wait for readers to show up and do the job for them. They expect every reader to hit the “share” button and to tell friends on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Plus, not to mention Pinterest, about the post. But that happens less than we would like.

Therefore, it’s up to you, the blogger, to share your posts on social networks. Doing so does not have to be time-consuming or feel like a sales job, though. Here are a few tips to help you make the job of sharing your work efficient, easy and fast.

Schedule Your Sharing Time

You don’t need to be on social media sites all day to accomplish your social media sharing goals. You do, however, need to have your posts shared regularly. That means setting up a sharing schedule.

I like to do this first thing in the morning, around noon, and then in the evening. It’s pretty simple just to click on my blog post, scroll to the sharing buttons, and share from the site to most of the social networks.

Keep in mind that you might need to alter the message. You don’t want to post from your Twitter account with the words “via @yourname,” for example. That’s fine if you share someone else’s post and the “@” sign is followed by their name. But when sharing from your site, revise and add some hashtags.

Also, don’t post to all the sites at the same time. I’ve done this…and do when in a hurry, but it always has the same result. If your LikedIn, Facebook, and Pinterest accounts all post to Twitter automatically as well, your Twitter account will end up with three updates in a row about your blog post. If you also post to Twitter at that time, you will have four updates in a row!

By scheduling your social sharing time (or your posts), you keep your time on social media sites to a minimum. At the same time, you ensure that your posts get shared.

Use Available Tools

You don’t always have to be present to share your blog posts. Instead, you can schedule your social media updates to post automatically using a variety of tools available today. You could try Buffer.com, SocialOomph.com, or Coschedule.com, for instance.

These tools allow you to schedule your blog posts, so you share them automatically. You decide how often they are shared and on what networks. You can share them several times in one day or numerous times over the course of a week or a month.

Additionally, the Revise Old Post plugin will choose previously published posts randomly and share them on Twitter. The WordPress.org plugin keeps a constant stream of your blog content flowing on this network.

All of these tools save you time, but you must put in the time initially. You must create the social share updates and schedule them. At that point, you can walk away until it’s time to stop the updates from appearing.

Have Goals and Evaluation Methods

If you don’t know what you want to accomplish with your blog-post-sharing efforts, it’s hard to know if you have reached your goals. That might leave you floundering around and spending more time on this activity than necessary.

Have clear goals and ways to evaluate if you are meeting those goals. If you are sharing your posts on social networks to increase traffic, then you want to measure whether your efforts result in increased unique visitors, for example. You may also want to determine if your traffic is coming from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or Google Plus. This knowledge helps you determine where to focus more time (because your efforts there are working). It also help you determine where to increase efforts (to see if you can improve your results) or where to stop sharing posts at all (because you aren’t finding readers on that social network).

Google Analytics provides a free and fairly simple way to gauge the effectiveness of your efforts. Under the “Audience” tab, click on “Behavior.” Then click on “New vs. Returning. Once on that page, use the drop-down menu to choose a “Secondary Dimension.” Choose “Social Network.” Now you can see statistics on where you visitors come from. “Audience” and “Overview” provides information on how many visitors your site enjoys. Track this month to month.

If keeping track of your analytics or determining what to blog about or what to share at what times confuses you, check out the social media templates from Hootsuite.com. Hootsuite is another tool you might find useful as you schedule your blog posts for sharing on social networks. You can download the following templates:

• social media strategy template
• social media audit template
• editorial calendar template
• social media content template
• bulk upload template

To learn more about the templates and download them, click on this link.

By staying aware of what is working and what isn’t, you more effectively share your blog posts. That means you spend less time on this activity but accomplish more.

Focus on Serving Your Readers

To make all of this sharing feel less like you are constantly promoting yourself and your work (or you blogged book), change your attitude about your blog-post-sharing efforts. Stop seeing this activity as “selling” or “promoting.” Instead, focus on how each post serves your readers or potential readers.

With this mindset, every tweet, status update or pin you create revolves around pointing out how what you have written benefits readers. Every time you share the link to a new post, you mention the value your post provides—or the question it answers or the problem it solves.

Do this often enough—and truly provide posts that address the needs of your market—and you will find your posts not only read but shared. That’s, of course, the goal.

If you have found ways to share your posts on social networks that help you do so quickly, easily, effectively, and without feeling too promotional, share them in a comment below.