If you write blog posts, you probably have some desire for people to read them. On WordPress, it’s not too hard for people to find you if you use tags and interact with other bloggers, but what if you want a wider audience? If you choose to go out looking for readers, social media is one obvious place you might go to promote your blog. Or you may hate social media and want to steer totally clear, or you may be somewhere in the middle. This post looks at what social media promotion might look like if you’re so inclined.
Connecting WordPress to your socials
WordPress lets you automatically share your posts to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tumblr (do people actually still use Tumblr?). You can set this up by going to My Sites > Tools > Marketing, and then click on the Connections tab.
You can verify your site with Pinterest and Facebook so those platforms know that the person who owns those social accounts is the same person who owns your website. This can be set up by going to My Sites > Tools > Marketing, then clicking the Traffic tab and scrolling down to Site Verification Services.
I’m not a fan of Twitter, which is actually putting it lightly, as most of the time I despise it. It seems like auto-sharing your own posts in the hopes of passively bringing in traffic doesn’t accomplish all that much, so I stopped doing that quite a while back.
Twitter blog promo threads
There are a variety of Twitter accounts that run promotional threads where people can promote their latest blog posts. On these threads, people will often write that they return all comments (i.e. if you leave a comment on their post, they’ll leave a comment on yours).
I’ve never actually participated in these, but they strike me as a really inefficient way to drive traffic to your blog. Since these threads are so tit-for-tat, it seems like they require a lot of effort, yet they seem unlikely to build an audience that’s likely to return to your site without you continuing to actively participate in these threads. I’m also not keen on spending a bunch of time reading and commenting on blogs I have no interest in just because I’m doing the returning all comments thing.
While these threads are certainly a way to get views and comments, I’d be curious to hear from people that do participate in these what you think of their efficiency.
Pinterest is my preferred social media platform because it’s really not social media; it’s more of a visual search engine. There’s very minimal person-to-person interaction, and you don’t get a feed focused on keeping up with what specific people are posting.
Because Pinterest is content search-oriented rather than person-oriented, follower numbers are a lot less important than other platforms. Creating pins involves work upfront, but pins can bring in big traffic long after they’re published without any work on your part. Pinterest is a pretty substantial source of traffic for me, and prepping pins to go with posts doesn’t require a lot of mental energy.
One thing I find weird about Pinterest is that most of my new pins don’t get much action; it’s the older ones that do well, which is the exact opposite of how Pinterest says their algorithm works.
Pinterest tips
I’ve been using Pinterest pretty much since I started my blog, but a lot of things about it remain rather mysterious and/or just plain weird. Here are a few things I’ve learned, though:
- Canva.com is useful for creating pinnable images, although the annoyance factor seems to be increasing regularly. Pinterest’s optimum dimensions are 1000×1500 px.
- Even if you’re not running your blog as a business, switching from a personal to a business Pinterest account gives you access to more features.
- The way you name and describe your boards impacts how findable they are and the pins that are in them are. Pinterest gurus say that your board covers should all have a similar look (and unlike other pins, they should be square). Pins seem do better when they’re in boards that are more popular, so lately I’ve been combining boards and using sections to organize them. I haven’t been doing that long enough to tell if it’s helping me at all.
- Your pin descriptions matter in terms of how findable your pins are when people search. You can also enter alt text that helps people using screen readers (as well as search engines).
- Hashtags can be used in pin descriptions, but I”m fairly sure that they don’t actually accomplish anything.
- You can save pins you’ve already created to multiple boards, but Pinterest is less keen on this than new pins. I will typically save each pin to one additional board a few weeks after originally posting it.
- You can join group boards, but from what I’ve read, they’re a lot less effective than they used to be at broadening your reach. The stuff I pinned to group boards never did well, so I’ve stopped doing it.
I don’t use Instagram enough to have much of a sense of how useful it is for promoting individual blog posts. It’s probably easier now that you can use links in your Stories, and I can see it being a way to let people who are already in your community that you’ve got a new post up.
While I can see Instagram being a decent way to get people to your site more generally, I’m curious to hear from others who are more frequent Instagram users whether they find it’s a good way to promote specific posts. How often are people actually looking at a post in their Insta feed, clicking through to the person’s bio to click the link in bio, then selecting a particular post link from whatever link in bio tool you might be using? That’s quite a few steps, and every extra step seems like it would decrease the likelihood of people following through.
I also wonder how many people are like me and tend to compartmentalize their social platform use. When I’m doing my WordPress thing, I like to stay on WordPress, and while I’m doing my Insta thing, I like to stay on Insta.
Other platforms
I don’t have a Facebook account, but I get a decent amount of traffic from other people (I have no idea who) sharing my posts there. I get substantially more traffic from Facebook than I do from Twitter, even though Twitter is something I actually use (albeit rarely).
I can see LinkedIn potentially being useful, depending on how connected and active you are there and what your blog is focused on. It doesn’t really strike me as the kind of platform where auto-sharing every post is likely to be a very high-yield activity. I share the odd blog post on LinkedIn (mostly book reviews) and get a handful of visitors a month coming from there.
I’m too old to see the appeal of Tiktok, so I don’t have much to say about that platform. As far as I know, if you have a Tiktok business account, you can add a clickable link in your bio, and use a link in bio tool like you would for Instagram.
I have strong doubts that anyone actually uses Mix, so I don’t think it’s a platform that’s likely to bring anyone to your posts, but sharing some stuff there can help your domain authority.
Social media management tools
There are a number of different tools that allow you to manage your social channels, including scheduling posts. What exactly your can do with them and what kind of analytics you get access to depends whether you use free or paid plans. The only scheduling tool I use is Pinterest’s built-in scheduler to do a day’s worth of pinning all in one go.
Tailwind lets you schedule things to share to Pinterest and Instagram, and it will suggest good times for you to post. It’s also got a tool to help you create graphics. Tailwind communities can also help to expand your reach.
Buffer is integrated with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Hootsuite works with all of those platforms, as well as Youtube.
If you want to learn more about being strategic with your social media use, Social Media Pulse offers free social media lessons.
Should you promote your blog on social media?
You may sometimes feel like you should be on social media to put your blog out there in the world, but you are totally free to ignore any and all shoulds that anyone is spouting regarding blogging. There is no universal law of blogging that says you must promote your blog on any specific social platform, or promote it at all. Just because a lot of other bloggers seem to be using one strategy doesn’t mean that you need to do the same thing. You do you.
It’s also worth considering what you’re trying to get out of your blogging experience. If you’re after community engagement, the traffic that you’re drawing in from social media probably isn’t going to be interacting with your blog in the same way as your WordPress traffic. If traffic without interaction does nothing at all to float your boat, social media promotion is probably a waste of your time.
Speaking of wasting time, social media promotion can be a massive time sink, and it’s probably worth revisiting every once in a while whether the benefit you’re getting out of particular strategies is enough to warrant the amount of time you’re putting in. It’s totally okay to say fuck it.
Now, over to you. Do you use social media to promote your blog, and if so, how? And if you don’t and want to spout off about how much you hate social media, feel free to go right ahead and do that. 😉
The blogging toolbox series has tips to support you in your blogging journey. It includes these posts:
Honestly, the only one of these I’ve had any success with is Pinterest, but it’s lately been taking the same route as the other sites and I’ve lost the majority of my traffic from there. All of these sites want one thing: to keep people on their platform and prevent them from leaving. That means they’re fighting you the whole time. I’ve taken a step back from all my socials because I’m tired of wasting my young life on them for little gain 😅
I agree, social media sites want to keep people on there. And I also agree that there are far better ways to spend your time than pouring it into social media.
Only think would add is create videos of blog post on YouTube. Need editing skills. But more search growth. Great post!
That hadn’t crossed my mind, but yeah, that makes sense.
Interesting read Ashley.
Thank you.
I am just content with WP.
Any thing wrong with me??🤔🤔🤔
Nothing wrong with that at all. WP is a great place to be.
Thank you Ashley.
👍👍
I always learn so much from you, Ashley. I have not promoted my blog on social media and have wondered if I should. You have given me some great actionable info so that I can think about it more broadly. Thank you!
And thank you! 💕
Pinterest? I never even thought of it. But what you’re saying makes total sense!
Insta I use, but not for blogging. I don’t write for friends per se. That’s the majority of my Instagram following.
Twitter I use for academic purposes, and is good for that. I don’t find much traffic coming from there, and going down by the week I think.
Most traffic comes from WP. Mostly through tags and comments on blogs I like, I suppose.
I never got the like for like, follow for follow, etc. I’m not interested in getting useless traffic that will cost me time to get, but is unlikely to stay.
I’d rather have 5 real people that read and appreciate.and may return, than 100 that read and leave to never return again.
I feel the same way. The like for like and follow for follow business just seems so artificial.
I had a Facebook page no one knew existed, now deleted. My blog posts go to Twitter to no effect whatsoever. The only response I get is here on WordPress. Fine. As you say, f@@k it 🙂
Exactly!
I love Instagram but it does very little for promoting my blog. U think people there like to see photos but not that interested in reading my work or seeing my posts sadly.
Instagram in particular seems set up to keep users in the app rather than leaving to read blog posts or visit websites.
Yes I guess so 🤔
Interesting stuff! Thanks for the Pinterest tips. I’m going to try using that more. I’m not great at creating pretty graphics, but I do have fun messing around in Canva.
As for other social channels, I’m with you on most things! Don’t have Facebook, but still get some traffic from others who share my content there.
Twitter is the only social channel I have set up for auto-sharing and I’ve gotten like 2-3 visits from it in as many months. I’ll probably disconnect it at some point, but that requires more effort than leaving it be.
As for IG- I used to be really into that platform. Now, it feels like another Facebook. I’m taking a break from it now but have gotten slightly more engagement through that channel. I have a link tree in my bio that brings traffic with a low bounce rate according to my analytics. However- I think sharing individual posts there is not worth the effort. People visit my blog through the link when they feel curious about what I’m up to, and not necessarily to read a post. More often, they sign up for my biweekly newsletter, which brings more interested reader than anything else.
I’ve never tried doing a newsletter. I think part of that is that I almost never sign up for newsletters, so I tend to assume other people don’t sign up for newsletters either, although logically I know that’s not true.
Great post 😊 I’d say I try to use social media, to some extent. I do have Twitter posting active, but Twitter is also a platform I rarely use and don’t really understand to be honest 😅 I try to use Pinterest a bit with the help of Tailwind, but I struggle with coming up with pin descriptions 🙈 I do like that I’m able to schedule pins for a while in one sitting though.
I find it hard to come up with pin descriptions too.
Sorry to say I am social media illiterate…. 🙂 I have a Facebook account and a Linked in page that I never use. Actively, I mainly just use WordPress…. I am embarrassed to say I don’t even know how to send a tweet….
You’re not missing anything on Twitter. I have a LinkedIn page that I rarely use. I’m very glad to stay focused on WordPress.
Starting a blog, I realize promoting it on social media is the best.
But Twitter has been a very hard nut to crack for me 🤣
Yeah, Twitter is tough!
Very tough but those who managed to conquer the toughness are really doing great.
Twitter requires more and more energy.
For sure.
Hey! I really enjoyed this post. I liked what you wrote about Pinterest. I have a Pinterest account and I still haven’t really figured out how to use it to attract followers. With that said, I use Instagram and Facebook to promote my blogs but I’m still not getting a lot of traffic so I’m just wondering if it’s my subject matter (depression) that fails to attract more readers. Anyway, thanks for this. I’m going to go back into my Pinterest account and use some of your suggestions.
One issue might be that your WordPress Gravatar is linking to your old blog rather than your current one. In the browser version of WordPress, if you click on your Gravatar in the top right corner of the screen, then go to “Account Settings”, you can change the “Web address” to your current blog.
Thanks so much for the tip!! I’ll do that today!
Great thread. Thanks for the tips!
😊
Great post! I also agree with the statements on Pinterest. My pins take at least a couple weeks to generate real reach. I have all the social media accounts possible to promote and I find that each one brings in a decent size of readers. But I’m also still growing and gaining more knowledge each day.
That’s great that you’re having success with multiple platforms!
Canva is great!
Never used Pinterest personally, might give it a go and see where it gets me.
I’ll use your tips for it, they look useful! 👍
Good luck with it!
🙏 thanks! 🙏