Forget growing your followers on social media.
As a continuation of the last post on the digital marketing tips we covered during our live Expert Session chat with Rachel Weinhold of GrowTraffic, in this post, we’re covering how to use various social media platforms to boost your SEO.
If your goal is to increase the readership of your content so that you can grow your audience and grow your email list and eventually get more customers, you’re in the right place.
By the way, you can catch the webinar replay in our Facebook group Skyrocket Blog Traffic.
At A Glance
It sounds really obvious, but this is one thing that a lot of people forget.
They put that content onto their social media BEFORE they put it onto their website.
Your social media should be the channel that you’re using to draw traffic back to your website. It should not be the place that you're building your audience in itself.
Nowadays, as you know, there seems to be a new social media platform that comes along every 6 months or so. Everyone's then all about that one and we're all doing this and all the other ones get threatened.
For example, TikTok comes along and it's all about video. And then all of a sudden, the Facebook and Instagram algorithms are changing to prioritize video because they're threatened by TikTok.
"But our customers aren't on social media.”
Well, that's not where we get our customers from. They're there, although they might not necessarily be looking for the solution that you sell at the time that they’re on there. But they're there, and you need to get in there and you need to interrupt their scrolling and get in front of their eyes.
This again is where that content marketing funnel comes in handy.
When somebody's on social media, there's even a level above the top of the funnel. That’s when they might be aware that they've got a problem, but they're not actively searching for it at all when they’re on Facebook or other social media platforms. They're looking at pictures of their cousin's kid or friend's new puppy.
That's where you've got to step in and interrupt that and create a bit of content that speaks to them at THAT time.
1. How much time do you have?
First of all, think about how much time you've got and be realistic about that. A lot of people decide they can be on every single platform there's out there. The more platforms you're on, the more content you've got to create based on the platform that you use. The more you've got to manage them, the more you've got to respond to people.
Next, think about the platforms that're going to be the most valuable to you - the ones that work for you the way that your brain works, the ones that work for your audience. It's not necessary to be on every single one.
To do that, think about your audience demographic and where they're most likely to be. Then, pick a few that're going to be manageable in terms of your time and what you can realistically achieve.
So for example, if your audience is older people, Pinterest is one of the best networks out there for growing traffic, and potentially Facebook. if you're speaking to people in their 20s and 30s, it's probably going to be Instagram and Twitter. If you’re speaking to the kids, it's going to be TikTok.
Pick 3 or 4 of these platforms.
3. Types of content for each platform
Next thing then is to think about how you need to produce content for that platform. So most of them now refer to video content. Failing that, they like image content. Text content still has a place, but it's probably the one that's going to get the least engagement from the algorithms.
Make sure you're creating content that works for that particular social media platform and that audience that's there, while always bearing in mind that you need to bring them back onto your website, not just using them solely in themselves.
It's not enough anymore to just post a link from your blog onto your Facebook; people will just scroll past it.
What you've got to do is pick out an interesting fact or pick out a quote from your blog posts that you've written that you can then put on to your social platform.
I use the social media scheduler Missinglettr for that; it pulls out quotes automatically while creating original posts and posting them on your different platforms for you!
Of course, the basic principles apply: create a unique post, use an engaging image.
If you're using WordPress, you don’t have much control over the image being used on social media. If you just put the link on, it will automatically pick your featured image. If your featured image is a title, that's not going to play very well. Facebook doesn't like images that have an awful lot of text on them.
Missinglettr eliminates this problem by pulling out images from your posts for you to choose instead of defaulting to the featured image.
Otherwise, you might want to use a stock photo e.g. Unsplash or Pixabay to get free ones. Use an engaging image, something that's going to grab somebody's attention. Again, they're scrolling, they're not looking for you specifically, so how're you going to grab their attention?
If you're using social media scheduling tools like Buffer or Hootsuite, remember to create posts specific to the platform i.e. create a post that's been designed for it. It's got the correct number of hashtags. It's got the correct word count. It's in the right formula. It's got a decent image.
If you post something to Instagram and then you just share the same post onto Facebook, you get that big line of dots before it puts the hashtags in.
People who see it know it. They might forgive it, but social media platforms are not so forgiving. They're all in competition with each other. They don't like you sharing content from one platform to the other. They want you to create native content.
The algorithms may let you do it a few times, but if you're continually taking people away from the platform - which is what they see it as - you'll get penalized.
The end goal is getting people from that platform onto your website, so the actual link to the blog post needs to be there.
You can put "link in comments" or "link in bio” or however you want to do it rather than just continuously put the link in the actual body.
Publish again, and again
When you're using your social media, it's absolutely fine to pick and choose any blog post to publicize multiple times, and it doesn't have to be every single time on the same platform.
Mix up your posts and platforms
It's a good idea to put it out multiple times. There're so many ways to share the same posts.
If you share your blog posts the first time, say in the morning, next time, do it in the evening a few days later. You can also write something like “did you catch this”, or pick out a different point within your blog post to talk about. For the third time, bring it back a week later, sometimes even a month later.
Don't just put it out once and don't just put out the same message on all three platforms. You could put it out on Facebook, then put it out on Twitter on a different post. You could put it out on Instagram on another day, another week.
This is why I love Missinglettr so much. It does exactly that! You can set up a 2-week, 6-month or 12-month campaign, and they’ll automatically set up a schedule and post it on your behalf once you’ve approved the posts.
Each of the posts you create on Missinglettr is unique as well as it uses AI to pull out quotes from your blog posts that you can choose to use for different posts.
If it needs a bit of a tweak to make it relevant, then put a little update on your blog post and post it out again and share it on your socials.
If if there's something in the news and you think you've got a relevant blog post about it not that long ago, that's a great way to get that content back out there. Share the news article and say, "I wrote a blog post about this just last month. Here's a link to the blog post."
The point is, keep using and reusing your content. Don't just share it once. Share it 3, 4, 5 times, a week later, a month later, 6 months later. Keep putting it out there multiple times, in as many different ways and in as many different formats as you can. Not everybody will see everything the first time.
Why repurpose content?
What you have to realize is that that people learn in different ways; no single person from your audience will see every single piece of that content.
They just won't. They'll see different things on different platforms. Some people will be visual learners and some people will not have time to watch things, but they'll listen to things. You've thus got to cater to all of those different people.
You're also creating content that fits all of these different platforms. So rather than trying to force an Instagram post onto LinkedIn, you're creating content that works for each of these platforms. And it's a much better way of doing it.
The other upside to repurposing on multiple platforms is that the algorithms will very quickly pick up that you're talking about a subject in different ways and at different times. You’re doing a deep dive into a subject, making you the authority in that one subject.
It's more important for SEO than people realize. It's so much more powerful to have 1 subject that you've done 10 pieces of content about than it is to have 10 different subjects that you've done 10 pieces of content about. That's because each time you produce different types of content on a different platform about that same topic, you're increasing your authority in that subject. It's so much more powerful from an SEO algorithmic point of view.
We get into more details of how to repurpose content for your marketing collateral and social media to save time and establish your authority in the next post!
Catch the rest of the Expert Sessions in our Facebook group Skyrocket Blog Traffic! We discuss topics such as email marketing, storytelling, branding, video marketing and more.
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