You’ve been putting a lot of hard work into your blog. You’ve crafted helpful content for your readers, researched the best keywords to use for search engine optimization and set up the perfect email campaign to keep your subscribers in the know. And while you may think you’re doing everything you can to increase your blog engagement and site traffic, you’re actually missing out on one of the most impactful resources: social media.

Building traffic to a brand-new blog can take time, and revamping an existing blog to increase metrics can take patience. But if you haven’t been utilizing social media as a lucrative space for growing blog traffic and brand awareness, you’ll bypass a large audience of potentially interested readers.

A good social strategy can make blog promotion more rewarding than ever. That’s why we’ve put together a list of the best social media platforms for bloggers. Feel free to use our list as a cheat sheet as you create your own approach to social media promotion!

Using Social Media to Boost Your Blog Traffic

So why use social media as a blogger? 

If it isn’t already obvious, there is a lot of potential growth to be harvested from social media. It’s the reason 81% of small to medium businesses use at least one social media platform for marketing. But just because it’s essential doesn’t mean it’s easy to navigate and grow. 

There are over 4.2 billion active internet users, 3 billion of which are on social media. While this means there are virtually boundless opportunities for you to increase your blog traffic growth, it conversely means you are competing with a vast number of other bloggers looking to do the exact same thing. No pressure, right? So we want to come up with a plan for you to use social media, not just as a marketing resource but as your marketing resource. 

Making social media work for you is primarily about finding your niche audience and highlighting the uniqueness of your content. What makes it so special? What information are you providing readers that they can’t get anywhere else? What makes you someone they want to trust and return to for more blog posts?

Now that we’ve established what you need to know about your blog before diving into social media marketing, let’s talk more about our best practices to take your unique brand and target it toward the audience of your choice. 

Don’t Make Things Hard

Our first tip is to always make things as easy as possible for your social media audience. If you have a new blog post to share with your followers, it shouldn’t be a scavenger hunt to get back to your site. 

Providing links within your social posts is a must in terms of accessibility and ease. Social media users aren’t going to be inclined to rummage through your social profiles for the information you’re promoting. Even leaving a link in the bio section of your profile instead of within your post can potentially decrease the amount of click-through engagement you receive through your promotional efforts. It’s all about making things as easy as possible. 

While social media platforms like Instagram have not made link accessibility possible for regular posts, you can link your blog posts on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Regardless of your platform of choice, making the content you’re promoting easy to access will give you more potential to increase foot traffic to your blog.

Promoting Your Blog on Instagram

If your platform of choice just so happens to be Instagram, don’t worry. We don’t want to cause a panic for bloggers out there looking to grow on Instagram without the link-hosting feature.

If you’re not an Instagram account with over 10,000 followers, you know the struggle of not enjoying the luxury of having the “swipe up” feature on your Instagram Stories. But that doesn’t mean all value gets taken away from a well-thought-out Instagram Story campaign.

Utilizing the tools you have, you can create pulling Instagram Stories to bring people to your Instagram profile and lead them to your bio link. You can share snippets of your blog content, craft up a creative using some of our favorite Instagram tools or use interactive tools like polls and questions to bring your audience through to your blog. 

And the best part – Instagram Stories have major reach opportunities. With 61% of all people on Instagram using Stories, you have a higher chance that your target audience will engage and convert into blog subscribers than with a normal grid post.

Make Sure You Find Your People

With so many people populating social media platforms, it’s important your efforts get placed in the right direction in order to get you the best results possible. That’s why finding your niche on social media is absolutely essential.

Whether you’re an established blogger or just starting out, finding the “sweet spot” for your blog on social media is all about intuitive experimentation. You’re going to want to test out different groups of hashtags, do research on influential accounts within your target market and try out a few different groups of people before you find the niche audience that works for you. 

We suggest putting your efforts into building a list of hashtags you can use for your target audience. If you’re using a platform like Instagram, this list may be more on the extensive side. However, for platforms like Facebook and Pinterest, you may find that spending your efforts on researching people and groups gives you better results.

When researching hashtags, you want to stick to hashtags that will reach your target audience but that aren’t overly saturated. If you use hashtags with hundreds of thousands of posts, your content could get lost in the mix. Try sticking to hashtags between 10k-100k posts to keep your content from being overshadowed. There are many other best practices you can use when researching and using hashtags correctly, so don’t skimp when doing your research!

Similarly, when you’re researching people to engage with and push your blog content toward, you want to think of people who would realistically view and engage with your content. Social media users with a large following may not have the time or resources to connect with you on social media. Stick to people who fit your target market but who also have the capacity to search for new content on social media.

Use Great Content To Promote Great Content

While your main goal is to bring your social media audience back to your blog post, that doesn’t mean you should be cutting corners when it comes to your promotional content. 

Social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram all run on algorithms that encourage using highly engaging visual content. With this in mind, if the content you’re putting out isn’t up to standard, you’ll be robbing yourself of the chance to have a wider audience reach – and build up your social following in the process.

Take into consideration the visual content you’re using in your promotional posts. If you’re using a link preview that allows you to host an image, be sure the image is both relevant to the content and eye-catching enough to get social users to stop scrolling and engage. 

If you’re promoting blog content using Pinterest, you may want to consider creating a Pinterest graphic with copy to use instead of just a simple image from your blog. And for Instagram, you always want to use as much space as possible. Strive for posting 4:5 images that will take up your audience’s screen, giving them no choice but to interact with what you’re promoting.

Social media is a powerhouse tool that, when paired with a good marketing strategy, can yield highly effective results. Allow it to be something that drives up your blog post traffic, and you could see better engagement on future posts.