How to Give Your Article More Discovery Power with Social Media
Give Your Blog or Article More Discovery Potential
Once you've written a blog article that answers crucial questions for your customers, take proactive steps to increase discoverability. Organic results through search engine optimization (SEO) maintain long-term goals.
You've optimized your article choosing one topic, formatting for readability, and organizing to lead your reader to a logical conclusion. Now you can share the benefits of your article with content curation.
Share Your Content
Social media provides avenues to share your content to wider audiences through the use of images, concise descriptions, tags, and hashtags. Each social media platform has a distinct way of garnering viewer attention.
I'll walk you through the basics of sharing on each major social media platform. Each one is different. Consider the demographics of each platform to decide which platform to use.
If you are just starting out, choose one or two platforms that best match your target audience—your potential customers.
Facebook is the number one social media platform with over 2.89 billion monthly active users. Your business may already have a Page on Facebook.
Add a link to your article. Facebook will pull in the image to display. Then add text in the post to get the reader interested in the content. Your introduction should be about 50 words that hit the high points of your article to arouse interest and get the reader to click through to your website.
Unfortunately, Facebook no longer does a good job of notifying followers of your post. Facebook sharing works best in conjunction with an ad campaign to bring targeted readers to the article on your website. Facebook ad strategies are beyond the scope of this article.
Instagram is image based and caters to a younger demographic than Facebook. You need to put the link to your website in your Instagram bio because Instagram does not allow links in the posts.
If you've done a good job aligning your article image with your topic, use that image. You'll need to post the image separately, and it's best if you use a 1080px X 1080px size. Canva.com can resize your image once you upload it to the platform.
Accompany your image with a text of about 50 words (similar to or even the same as your Facebook text). Include at the end, link to article in bio.
The magic of finding the right people happens with hashtags. Add around 30 hashtags after your text. Do an internet search for the best hashtags for your business industry.
Twitter has been around for years. It works with brief text and hashtags. Twitter requires an economy of words to fit the 280-character limit. Be aware that limit is character-based, not words. A space counts as a character.
Twitter allows you to add a link. Because of the character limit, use a link/URL shortener like bit.ly, TinyURL, or Ow.lly to create a short link to your article.
Create your enticing introduction in around 25 words.
Use hashtags on twitter, but don't overload with multiple hashtags like Instagram. Choose two or possibly three hashtags that are relevant to your article topic.
Your 25 words, the shortened link, and the hashtags will get you to the character limit.
Like Facebook, the link will bring up the article image to complete your post.
LinkedIn is especially important if you market your business products or services to other businesses.
A LinkedIn post will pull the image in your article from the URL when you copy it in.
Above the link, add two to tree sentences that best introduce the article topic.
LinkedIn also uses hashtags. Use four or five hastags relevant to the article topic.
Pinterest is also image based. And Pinterest users like to save things for the future.
On Pinterest, you add the image and a link to your article. The title you create can match the title of your article.
Because Pinterest is visually oriented, keep your description brief—25 to 30 words. Think of it as teaser text to get viewers to visit your article.
YouTube
Don't overlook YouTube as a discovery vehicle for your article. It is the second largest search engine in the world. As a way to reach people, YouTube is worth your effort.
You can record a video that speaks to the salient points of your article.
If you are camera shy, services like Lumen5 read your text and work with artificial intelligence. It suggests images for you to choose. You can highlight text from key points in your article and match them to an image. You can also choose background music to add a tone to your video message. The result is a polished video of the key points of your article.
However, you create your video, you can add more to the video by writing a description to accompany the video. Use one or two key topics (keywords) in the description and add a link to the article.
YouTube uses tags which work to help people find videos that will answer their questions. They work like hashtags on other social media platforms. YouTube allows a total of 500 characters for tags. That means you can add a number of tags, including those with multiple words, to your video.
Social Media is a Path to New Customers
When you expose your article to social media audiences, you increase the potential to reach new customers and clients. Instead of letting your article sit on your website, you can expand reach by connecting to social media platforms.
Using social media as a tool for online marketing is a strategy aimed at boosting the opportunity for new people to learn about your brand.
You want to keep the same idea of focusing on one concept for each social media post. In the same way each article on your website increases your credibility, each social media post augments your expertise.
As you monitor different social channels, you can adjust the effectiveness of your content across the board. When you make changes to your articles, photos, or blog posts, it will also alter the audience that you attract. If you’re building your relationships on social media, besides "just" posting, you build your position as an expert.
Social media is a key component of marketing for small business. Don't overlook the potential to reach new customers.
Photo byAdem AY onUnsplash
