How To Use Twitter And Facebook To Grow Your Blog

Your blog is your connection to the rest of the world. It is simultaneously your platform and your brand, where you will hopefully get more opportunities to get to the next step of what you want to do with your life. Perhaps instead you wish to blog full time and make it profitable to focus on your blog or blogs for your career.

Either way, you are going to need to grow your readership, and the best way to start doing that is to tap into the network of people you’ve built over the years. This means you should use social media, and even more specifically you should be using Facebook and Twitter because no matter what other people say they are the two top social networks if you want to get a message out there.

Take into consideration these different tips and strategies so that you might be able to best utilize social media for your blog:

Don’t Overdo It

No one likes to get messages or notifications about someone else’s blog every hour. People will feel that it is just cluttering up their feed and then either unfollow you or block you out. At best, your followers will just skim through your posts while moving on to other content. Try to put yourself in their shoes. Do you like seeing ten pictures of your friend’s exotic animal a day? Probably not. That being said, you would likely be interested a few times.

Try to gauge just what frequency of posts would be most appropriate considering your blog. Try to tailor it to your audience and niche. If you write a tech blog and your friends are mostly people interested in gadgets and technology, then you can be a little more liberal about posting a lot. If it is shorter content, you might be able to post just a little more on your Facebook page.

Also, generally don’t post something twice unless someone specifically asks you for a link. People have seen it and made a decision on it already, and most people would be annoyed at your persistence.

Finally, as a general rule, you can post much more often on Twitter without people being bothered by it in the least. The frequency of posts there is such that people rarely read their entire twitter feed. In contrast, many active Facebook users read their entire Facebook feed.

Don’t Post Just a Link

After years of conditioning from questionable chat rooms and hacked accounts, most people (rightly) ignore posts that are just a link with no explanation. They don’t know what they would be getting into, and don’t want to click on anything unmentionable or crude.

For this reason you should make sure to try and give an explanation of what the link is, or give some context behind the content in the blog post. Make it as friendly as possible, these are your friends and acquaintances after all. On twitter you have to be briefer, but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to use all the space available and give it a proper, if brief, explanation.

Use Peak Times to Your Advantage

Most people will check their social media throughout the day, but they mostly just skim. You want people to sit down and read your blog in full, and possibly share it themselves. To do this, you should try to use peak hours to your advantage. This will probably be lunchtime wherever you live and in the afternoon right before work ends. You might want to experiment a little to fine tune it to your connections, but start there.

That being said, if you have a great deal of followers from another region of the world, you might want to focus on them a little more so you don’t post a link that appears for them at four in the morning. This might be a special case where you can post something more than once, although even then most of your close friends will read it anyway.

Start Getting More Involved on the Platforms

You won’t get very far in spreading the word about your blog on social media if no one is connected to you on. If you haven’t already, try to make as many connections as you can, and remember that you can just ignore their posts or otherwise adjust your feed to your liking. The best thing you can do is to try and also respond to other people’s posts and tweets, making your presence known on the network.

While you don’t want to be seen as annoying, you should also post other things that you are interested in on your account. Retweet posts by other people you like. Don’t think of social media as a business opportunity all of the time and just act naturally while you also occasionally let people know that your blog is part of your life that others might be interested in.

Always be Connected

Timeliness and quick reflexes can be more of an asset than you think if you are using social media to boost your blog, because people will often be quick to forget about something if they’ve commented on it. Try to check on your accounts every couple of hours at least and if someone wants to open a dialogue with you about your passion take that opportunity every time. There is little that could go wrong if you are polite, and engaged readers are frequent readers. If you have the option and/or availability, try to give make sure you get notifications on your phone whenever something happens pertaining to your posts.

You will also probably want to use a VPN while you’re out using public networks, because if you are out on the go, you still will often need access to the internet and your smartphone’s data plan can grow costly depending on the details. This way, your account details won’t get stolen and if you are growing a blog then having your account hacked, even if you get it back, can be one of the worst possible things that can happen to you.

You should also make it a habit to check whatever accounts you have in both the morning right after you get up and right before you go to bed. Perhaps you might want to post something non-blog related at that time, too. Good habits are the key to getting more readers.

I hope that these tips help you to make your blog as great as it can be. Thank you for reading.