Blogging is an excellent, multi-pronged tool for B2B marketers. It’s a great way to drive traffic to your website, establish your teaching point-of-view, fill the top of your funnel, and nurture those that are already in. Additionally, blog posts provide an excellent source of information your sales and sales development teams can use to utilize to move the sales process along.
In a recent blog post, Matt shared key areas where B2B bloggers need to focus to get the most bang for the buck from their blogs. One of the areas he talks about is promotion. He talks about using social media to promote your blog. And at Imagine, we follow that advice. We promote our posts through LinkedIn and Twitter like I’m sure many of you do as well.
While self promotion using social media is very important, getting people to share your posts can have even more impact as your content is spread to more audiences…but it can be a challenge. Here are eight tips to try.
1. Share your posts multiple times
As Matt said in his post last week: promote! But don’t just take a one and done approach. If you want your posts to be shared, then you need to promote them more than once. For example, at Imagine we are most active on Twitter and LinkedIn. When we have a new blog post to share, we write five tweets to go with it and then publish those tweets through six Twitter profiles. So each post, is shared 30 times over a four-week period. Additionally, we write two LinkedIn posts and share those through the same number of accounts over the same time period.
Another approach to promoting your own posts comes from the book The Art of Social Media by Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick. They recommend tweeting the same tweet four times in the same day.
In the end, your audience (your buyer personas) will dictate an approach that is the most effective. Knowing when and where they engage will shape your strategy.
2. Make sharing easy
This one should go without saying but sometimes we overlook the obvious. Include social sharing buttons where readers can see them and easily use them. At Imagine, the buttons appear to the left of each post. They are easy to find and easily accessible.
Recently, I’ve seen social sharing buttons that float on the page and move with the reader as they advance through the content. Depending on your content management system, you may be able to add a similar feature.
The key here is to make the buttons easy to identify and interact with on your page.
3. Include Click to Tweet Snippets
If you’re not already doing this yourself, I’m sure you’ve seen it in other posts. By including pre-written tweets, you take making it easy to share another step further. Your readers won’t even have to think about what they want to say when they share to Twitter – you will have done it for them. Here’s an example from a HubSpot blog on the same topic.
In fact, there’s a tool called ClicktoTweet. Give it a try!
4. Use email marketing
At Imagine, we offer two subscription types to our blog – instant and weekly. If you have an instant subscription, we send you an email every time a new post publishes. If you are weekly subscriber, you get an email every Wednesday. Sharing your posts through email gives readers another opportunity to share without finding the content on their own. Make sure you include the share buttons as part of the email to make it as easy as possible.
5. Share other content
Chances are if you share content written by others, they may share yours too. It’s not an eye-for-an-eye approach – just share content that you find valuable and relevant to your audience and you may just see others start to share your content more often.
6. Say thank you
When you discover that someone has shared your content, say thank you. It is a small gesture that can go a long way. It also opens the door for further engagement on a more significant level.
7. Reach out to influencers
There has been a lot written about influencer marketing in the last 12-18 months. Establishing a relationship with influencers in your industry can have a significant impact. Spend some time identifying the influencers in your market and create a plan to reach out to them. Connect via social media. Engage with their content. When you have a post that you feel will resonate with their audience, ask them to share it. If they find it valuable enough to share, their followers may too.
8. Write content that your buyer personas want to share
Seems very obvious, right? But in the end, it is the key to getting people to share your content. Spend the time and the energy to truly understand your buyer personas and the content that will resonate with them. If you are regularly writing content that educates them or is helpful in any way, they will want to share it. At the end of the day, if your content isn’t valuable to your audience, why would they share it?
