Engaging with your audience should be one of your top priorities, it creates a bond of trust and understanding of your company and products/services. Blogs and social media updates are a great way to promote your company as experts in their field as well as providing a variety of relevant and useful information.
That’s not to say that every blog and social media post you do, should be focused on your products and services – people will soon find this very bland and will no longer be interested in reading your content. Your blog and social media content should be relevant to your industry (with the occasional exception), varied and interesting.
If you haven’t written any blogs yet, take a look at our “How do I write a blog?” post, which gives a simple guide to get you well on your way to writing your own content.
Once you have written your blog, it is time to take a look at how you will promote this through social media, in order to drive traffic to your blog page and overall website. Whilst it would be quick and easy to duplicate post content across social media platforms, we would strongly recommend that you tailor your post to the social media platform. Here’s how we promote our blogs on:
The most popular social media platform of them all, Facebook is a great place to give your business personality, whilst promoting your services and products. Here at Your Marketing Needs we find that Facebook works brilliantly for our B2C customers, so we tend to focus more so on Facebook posts. We would always recommend using an image as part of your post on Facebook, as these perform better than automatic link previews or text only. By putting the link to your blog at the end of the post, people can easily follow through to read the full story.
Keep in mind that whilst Facebook allows up to 10,000 characters in a post, only the first 480 characters are available – so keep it short and sweet to ensure that people will want to read more, rather than reading it all in the post itself.
Twitter is a great platform that we have found works for both B2C and particularly B2B. Twitter was created for hashtags and @ handles, with only a 140-character limit – which has since been upgraded to 280 characters. By using hashtags on particular words/subject that you mention in your post, you can increase the likelihood of people coming across it. This seems to work really well for current news and events. Keep Twitter posts short and make sure to include an image in your post, whether this is uploaded on its own with a link, or if you opt for the automatic link preview and change the image.
Linked In
Linked In is a more professional platform that works incredibly well for B2B. Posts can include 600 characters, but only the first 150 will be visible with an option to read more. For an effective post, we would again recommend adding an image along with a link at the end of the post. The best way to get people to engage with your posts on Linked In is to ask questions and encouraging people to interact with the post.
Other tips
Aside from tailoring your post to individual social media platforms, we would always advise asking questions and making text personal, yet professional to get an engaging response from your audience.
Sharing your post will also create additional engagement, so consider doing this once a week, then reducing to every one or two months – if the information provided in the blog is still relevant. If the blog and surrounding social media posts are regarding your products and services, consider sharing the update more often.
If you’re thinking about hosting a competition on your social media page, then share the post and encourage others to share as part of entering, this helps to boost reach and engagement.
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