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I thought it was perfect that today's ArmchairBEA topic is Social Media. I write a lot about social media and how to use to to support your blog. It can be a great tool for reaching a larger audience, but it also can be a huge time drain. In an effort to keep this post short (I know you are trying to visit a lot of blogs today) I'll give you some of my top tips regarding social media.
Top Channels:
There are a lot of social media channels you can use, with more popping up every day. I recommend 3 major channels to have at least a presence: Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Most of my traffic comes from Twitter and Facebook and it is easy to interact with fans. Interaction is important to building a loyal following. Ask questions, share your favorite quotes, post pictures. The key to successfully using social media is to share a variety of content and not the same thing all the time. Another important thing to remember is to actually interact. If someone comments on your status post, be sure to respond. It is all about being SOCIAL.
A note for those that want to keep their personal life and blogging life separate - create a page on Facebook for your blog. You will get analytics and other useful things for promoting your content.
I use Google+ because it does help raise your ranking in search. But other than that I don't do a lot with it.
Time Savers:
I know reading and writing reviews can take up a lot of time. But being active on social media is also important and can be a HUGE time suck. By automating a lot of your posting you save yourself time.
I use three tools for automating my content posting.
- Hootsuite - I can create posts when I have time and then schedule them to go out whenever.
- Triberr - I'm part of several tribes and it provides me with content that will be of interest to my following. And in turn my blog content is shared with other people's networks.
- Buffer - Again it is a source of content - mostly about marketing and creativity. It works well with my audience. There are a lot of articles, but also quotes.
These time savers are great, but if you rely solely on them you will lose some of the socialness that is social media. You need to check in a a few times a week and talk with your followers otherwise your postings will just become noise.
Follow Me:
If you would like to follow me on social media, you can find me in the following places.
Google+
You can find me other places with the icons at the top of the left hand side bar. I highly recommend that on your blog you put links to your social media channels some where easy to find.
Today's Instagram Challenge: #SpinePoetry
Posts
I need to get better about scheduling some social media posts ahead of time. That is a great tip!
ReplyDeleteI never ended up creating a Google+ I've never really saw the purpose, despite Google's continued attempts to persuade me that it can be used for... something.
ReplyDeleteMy ABEA social media post here.
Off to make sure I stalk all your channels. :-)
ReplyDeleteYeah I've always publicized with Google+ but I wasn't actually sure what it did LOL. A great find for me in ABEA was tweet scheduling as it never actually occurred to me to automate some of that process.
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Joey via. thoughts and afterthoughts