I’ve had great pleasure in hosting The Blog Lowdown here for many months, and now that the series has drawn to a close, I though it’d be good to take a look back at it and share some of the advice that a whole host of bloggers have been wonderful enough to share with us week in, week out. There’s been plenty of tips and countless useful suggestions, so I thought I’d group them into a few themes that I’ll share with you over several posts.
To kick us off, here we have a selection of top social media tips from the series…
1. Use each of your social media profiles in a different way. Sure you want to plug your posts, but you also want to create unique content, giving people a reason to follow you on more than one of your social media platforms without boring them! It also allows you to gather followers from right and left for a variety of reasons …Different bait for different ponds! But all of which ultimately increase your exposure (and contribute to your TOTS100 ranking). (Misplaced Brit)
2. Make sure to add feeds from each of your social media accounts into your blog. You may not be posting daily, but if you’re updating Facebook, posting on Instagram & pinning treasures on Pinterest – let it all show! Let your blog be loading with new information all the time, so whenever anybody comes back over to your site, there are new discoveries to be made! (Misplaced Brit)
3. Work hard to build up a Facebook following. Twitter, Bloglovin etc. are fab but you are mainly communicating with other bloggers. To get to a wider audience I find Facebook is by far the best medium and it has a great potential for viral spread, too. (Hurrah for Gin)
4. Remember social media is all about engagement. A feed full of self-promotion or streams of consciousness of your opinions or activities will soon get boring for your followers. Interact – share posts, make (kind) comments, offer (constructive) advice. Use tools like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck sparingly. They can be useful for things like keyword searches and scheduling posts, but they are no substitute for interaction. (Headspace Perspective)
5. When it comes to Twitter, promote great content, whether it’s yours or someone else’s. Be a source of valuable information. (Misplaced Brit)
6. Be active on Google Plus! Like, reshare, comment and engage. Write a few sentences explaining why you’re sharing your own post or resharing someone else’s. If you just link dump then many on G+ consider this as spam. Google+ is a great platform to find the top experts on blogging and social media. It’s also very visual (like Pinterest) and you’ll find more interaction if you upload large images. (Wild About Here)
7. Use Instagram, and include a link to your blog in your profile. If people like your photos, they are likely to visit your page. (Family Fever)
8. Be active on Instagram. If you want to increase your following, being active is about more than posting, it’s about interacting with others. Don’t think of instagram as your personal photo album, think of it as your invite into everyone else’s life & living room. It’s not enough to go around clicking ’like’ on everything. Everybody’s doing that – so you’re one of 40 likes they just had! If you want to get to know people; if you want to network; if you want to stand out – you need to comment – and it takes literally only a few seconds. (Misplaced Brit)
9. And I’d have to add in the fabulous social platform that is Pinterest, too! Here’s my blogger’s guide to it.
10. I’d also always point people in Kriss’ direction, at Over There to Here for Google + tips, and Hannah over at Mum’s Days wrote a great post on Facebook Page tips recently.
To read the full interviews with any of the bloggers mentioned, simply search for them in my side bar and their full Blog Lowdown post will come up for you.
Which of these will you get working on first?
Other posts you may like…
My Top 20 Tips for Bloggers
How to Write a Brilliant ‘About Me’ Page
10 Tips to Get Your Blogging Mojo Back
5 Tips for Starting a Blog Linky
Some great tips here – thank you for sharing them.
You’re welcome. Thought it was a handy way of summing up some of the many Blog Lowdown learns!
Some fantastic tips here – thank you for this! I am definitely going to think about how I can use my social media in different ways.
Thanks for sharing yourself. Yes, that one’s got me thinking, too x
Great tips & reminders. Pinned
Thank you!
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Wow! Stuff I hadn’t considered in this article. Very Helpful! I’m a newbie writer/blogger and older (age wise) individual. Thanks for this!
You’re very welcome! I’ve a fair few blogging tips posts, so hoping they’ll all help!
There is so much I need to learn to get the most from social media, but I’ve never been totally comfortable with it. Since I started blogging I do use Twitter,Pinterest and Google +( Google+ and Pinterest being my favourites), but nowhere near as much as I should/could.
I have a FB account which I started to stay in contact with friends and family in the UK, I rarely use it and don’t want to bore people I know with what I write (much better to bore people I don’t know!).
I keep saying to myself that I must interact more on social media and slowly, slowly I think I’m getting there (still a long way to go though!). Reading posts like this helps a great deal as it brings home just how big a role social media can play when getting readers for blogs.
I have a separate blog FB account, and rarely update my personal one, so perhaps try that? I think social media is huge for bloggers, but you can;t actually be everywhere at once, can you?! Glad it helped x
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