An Effective Blog Post Promotion Checklist for Social Media

In this post I’m going to give you one of my promotional strategies for whenever I publish content… it’s a blog post promotion checklist I use specifically for social media.

I know it feels wonderful to publish a juicy blog post you’ve spent a lot time working on. The more time and effort you’ve spent writing something you’re proud of, the more satisfying it is. But once you’ve pressed the publish button, is that the end of your focus on it? Do you just let it work it’s magic unaided?

If so, how is that working for you?

The truth is, most of us should give every post we publish a helping hand by promoting it in some way.

If we just leave our content to find an audience on it’s own, it’ll behave like a fart in the wind. Other bloggers in your niche will be shouting about their content after they publish, so you too need to raise your voice to elevate your posts too.

With this in mind, my social media blog post promotion checklist is designed to increase the visibility of your content by focussing on:

• Facebook.
• Instagram.
• Pinterest
• Quora.
• Twitter.

I use some other social platforms in a more detailed version of this blog post promotion checklist, but for now this will be more than enough work for most, so I’ll save that for a rainy day!

Why is Blog Post Promotion in Social Media Important?

For me the most important reason for promoting your blog posts in social media is because it’s a quick way to market them. You control what you publish and you can create tweets, posts and pins etc. relatively quickly.

However, I know it can be a real drag to add a bunch of other things on top of the preparing great content to publish. Sadly though, if you don’t do some promotion, you’re not giving your your blog posts the best start in life. This is a huge shame if you’ve spent a lot of time sweating over it.

Of course your social media following has a bearing on the impact and reach your social posts have. But even if you have a small following, promoting blog posts in social media using some or all of my checklist steps can still have a powerful effect. They might even help your posts get shares and gain you followers at the same time.

It’s important!

A Note on Using My Social Media Blog Post Promotion Checklist

Sometimes after publishing a blog post, I use all the steps below to promote it in each of the social media channels I’ve listed. However, I don’t carry out all the steps in every single channel for each new post I publish. Instead, I pick and choose what’s I feel is most suitable for each one.

You can use this checklist as you see fit according to which social media platforms you prefer. However, I recommend using all of them to get the most benefit.

Facebook

• Share your new blog post on your Facebook page and make sure it’s a public post so everyone can see it. Include a link to the post and a relevant summary and hashtags.
• Ask some of your friends to share your blog post if you’ve got something you feel deserves an extra push.
• Create a microblog summary or an actual snippet of your blog post as a Facebook Note… of course, include a link to the blog post.

N.B. Always @mention the Facebook account of anyone you reference in your blog post.

Instagram

• Share your blog post on Instagram with a useful snippet or microblog about it. Include a reminder for people to click your bio link to visit your blog.
• Make sure you include the most relvant hashtags for the blog post.
• Look for other people using the hashtags you’ve used and comment on their posts.
• Create a story with key details from the post and include a reminder to click your bio link.

N.B. Always @mention the Instagram account of anyone you reference in the post you published on your blog.

Pinterest

• Look for search terms relevant to your blog post in the Pinterest search bar.
• Create 3 to 5 pins for your blog post and include them in the blog post itself. Make sure you include versions of the search terms you’ve found in the images you create. You may “hide” some, or all of them, if you prefer, but it’s important that Pinterest “sees” each image on the post for your pins to get the benefits of the Rich Pin feature.
• Prepare a description for your pin including the most relevant search terms you found earlier. Write your description naturally and do not keyword stuff and include hashtag versions of your keywords (up to 3).
• Schedule 1 or all of your pins (depending on your preference) within the first 5 pins you publish on a given day. Make sure you pin them to the most relevant board(s).

Quora

• Look for questions related to your blog post topic on Quora. Provide a summary of your blog post as an answer and add a link appropriately to your blog post as a way to offer more detail.
• Add comment(s) to other peoples answers in the same answer thread.
• Include a specific link to the blog post (if you want to give it more more visibility specifically) in your Quora profile.

Read more on how to get ideas for content from Quora.

Twitter

• Tweet about your blog post on Twitter. Include a brief summary and a link to it as well as relevant hashtags and @mentions for specific Twitter users if they feature in the blog post.
• Give your tweet a bump by replying to your own tweet!
• If anyone shares your tweet, retweet it.
• After you’ve posted your initial tweet (hours or even days later as per your preference), repurpose key phrases or snippets from your blog posts as individual tweets or a tweetstorm thread. Always link back to the blog post.
• If you reference other Twitter users in your blog post, create an image including their quote or advice etc. Include a link back to your blog post.

Summary

As I mentioned above, you can’t just publish blog posts and expect people to find them. As bloggers we’re competing with who knows how many other people so we have to take some steps to promote what we publish.

Ideally, you’d carry out all these steps in my blog post promotion checklist. However, I understand this will add some overhead to your workload.

For example, creating images for Pinterest and providing detailed answers to questions in Quora takes time to do well. So my advice is to dip in to the checklist and use the elements that work for you. If that’s just the Twitter or Pinterest elements, then so be it.

Getting started on some form of social media promotion is going to be 100% better than doing nothing. Perhaps you’ll get used to the steps, find out what works for you and develop your own version of them that works best for you.

When you get into the swing of doing whichever steps you use from the checklist, you might be ready to include some of the others at that point.

That’s it for now.

Paul

If you use my blog post promotion checklist I’d love to hear how you get on with it. Leave a comment below and tell me how it’s worked for you.