A Definitive Guide to Social Media Marketing for Bloggers Part 2 of 2
This is the second of a two part article on this topic. Part one of this article can be found here.
Understanding Your Audience And Fostering customer loyalty
Most businesses will recognise the importance of developing a loyal customer base. As a blogger your aim is to build and foster a loyal audience that will look forward to regularly coming back to your site to consume your content.
Social media allows you to regularly engage with your audience, a crucial element to have in your marketing arsenal, which will help you to grow and build a loyal following and a loyal customer base. This is also one of the best ways to demonstrate to your followers and customers alike that they are valued whilst at the same time allowing you to better understand their needs.
By connecting with your followers and customers on social media, they are also more likely to react more positively and more favorably towards your business.
One caveat in using social media is that it is important to understand that you should only share appropriate content which reflects and supports the values of your business.
Using Social Media To Build Your Though Leadership
A thought leader is not someone who is simply an expert on a particular subject matter! A thought leader is someone (or a company) who has been elevated in the eye of their audience, to the extent that they are seen as a person whose views on a subject are considered to be authoritative and influential. A thought leader is a trusted authority that moves and inspire others with their forward thinking and innovative ideas.
So how can you use social media to elevate your thought leadership status? You can do so by continuing to share your excellent, interesting and shareable content on a regular basis across multiple social media channels. It is also important that you engage with your audience as much as possible, showing your followers that you’re open and receptive to directly interaction with them. This should include liking and commenting on others social media posts.
As a blogger you know that producing great and original content takes time! However by making the extra effort to produce superior content and by showing your visitors that you are willing to participate on social media, you will be demonstrating to your audience that you place high importance on providing great information and value and that you are not interested in making a sale!
In reality, by supplying superior content, not only will you be elevating your status but you will also be attracting potential customers to your business.
Collaborating With Other Influential Bloggers
By collaborating with other influential bloggers in your industry, especially if they are prepared to share your content, you are not only elevating your own position and your brand, but you will potentially be increasing the reach of your own audience.
There’s a rule (the 1% content rule) that says only 1% of users online are content creators. The other 99% are content consumers. Influencers who are also ardent content creators are the most likely to have garnered a large social media following. This includes ardent podcast creators. Collaborating with such influencers is likely to increase the value of your content considerably.
Ensure Your Website Is Fast To Load And Mobile Friendly With An SSL Certificate
There are over 3.98 billion active mobile internet users world wide. The number of mobile internet users far exceeds that of computer users. It is therefore crucial that your blog and website is fully mobile compatible and has a fast loading time.
Your website should load within around 3 seconds. Search engines are also know to penalize websites which are not mobile friendly and has a slow load times.
You should also ensure that your blog and website is operating using an SSL certificate (meaning that your web browser should be showing a secure pad lock in the address bar – as you would see when visiting a banking website).
Choosing Your Social Media Channels
There are many social media channels today which you could consider using to promote your blog content. However you should only need to focus on a small selective group.
Below I will cover a selection of the more popular social media platforms which you may wish to target as a blogger. This information is not intended to be a comprehensive cover, rather it provides a broad introduction to the covered social channels.
Promoting With Facebook
It is perhaps appropriate to start with a few important Facebook statistics. Facebook has more than 2.4 billion active users (as of June 2019). It’s also interesting to note that 88% of these users are actively access Facebook via a mobile device. Facebook users consists of 52% female and 48% male.
Whether you are a big brand or a one man business, Facebook is considered the premier social media tool to help grow your business. A Facebook business page offers many benefits, not least of which is that it makes the name of your business searchable on Facebook as well as allowing you to directly post or share your promotional material on your page (Facebook does not allow promotional material to be posted on your regular profile). It is therefore essential that you create a Facebook business page to represent and promote your business.
Facebook Groups allows brand to provide a place where customers, prospects and fans can be updated with their latest information as well as being a place where questions can be asked and feedback provided. This provides an opportunity for brands to deepen it’s connection with its prospects, customers and fans.
Facebook Promoted Posts allows a post made by a brand to reach a wider audience by paying a small fee.
Facebook advertising and retargeting uniquely allows brands to reach a highly targeted audience demographic. New businesses that do not have a good social media presence can consider utilising Facebook Ads to expose their brand to a wider audience.
Promoting With LinkedIn
With some 645 million users, LinkedIn is the world’s largest online professional social network. LinkedIn allows a brand to reach a wide audience of professional users all the way up to fortune 500 decision making executives. Brands can create a business profile page to represent their brand allowing their products and services to be showcased. Brands can build their followers by posting and sharing valuable content on their business page.
A LinkedIn business showcase page is an extension to a business company page. A LinkedIn business showcase page allows a brand to highlight a particular product or service.
LinkedIn Groups allows a brand to build a community around their brand, industry or any topic of interest. This allows the involved parties to share articles other content of interest.
Promoting With Twitter
Twitter is reported to have 330 million monthly active users creating 500 million tweets per day. These are figures that brands and businesses cannot afford to ignore. Some 87% of B2B marketers are reported to be utilizing Twitter in their marketing.
Twitter has become a behemoth of a platform with users ranging from all spheres of life including celebrities, politicians and businesses the world over.
Your Twitter profile can be customised to showcase your brand by using a custom header image as well as a profile image.
Twitter allows you to follow influences in your niche and potentially have them follow you. Twitter allows you to freely share and promote brand content to your audience.
Promoting With Pinterest
Pinterest has some 291 million monthly active users. As a business you will want to create a Pinterest business account. Pinterest allows you to create boards (categories) to which Pins (and image with a description) can be published to potentially reach a wide audience.
When seeking to drive traffic back to a blog post for example, you would want to post the featured image from your blog post along with a ‘teaser’ section of text (an attention grabbing description of up to 300 words) with a link back to your blog article.
Note that Pinterest Pins are designed to be tall (not wide), so in some cases you may want to use an image similar to your blog post featured image but which might be more suitable to fit the preferred format of Pinterest pins.
Promoting With Tumblr
Tumblr is a popular micro blogging platform which allows you to share your content to a wide audience. There are over 463 million blogs on the Tumblr platform with more than 170 million posts and around 371 million monthly visits. More than 7.2 million new blogs are shared on the platform each month.
Almost 50% of Tumblr users are in the younger age group 18 to 34. Many brands are today promoting their product and services on Tumblr.
So these are compelling reasons which you should be using Tumblr as part of your marketing mix.
