Hey! My name is Lyndsay and I blog over at Fizzy Peaches I’m here today to add a touch of geekery to Julie’s gorgeous beauty blog. I’ve been a big fan of her posts for a while now, so was really excited about the opportunity to write this guest post.
Today I’m going to be talking about how to use Social Media for bloggers. This to help promote yourself and your blog, increase your followers, it’s also a great place to get in touch with PR’s too. If you aren’t using social media properly already - what have you been waiting for?
1. Twitter
Twitter is every bloggers dream. There are so many reasons why every blogger should be an active member of Twitter, but here are just a few…
a) Meet other bloggers, brands and PR’s - Build a good following by interacting with like-minded people, joining in with blogger chats and contacting brands. Then you can promote every blog post you write through twitter to the right audience. Always include the username of the brand if it’s a review, however, remember not to put a username as the first character or it’ll just show on their timeline, not to everyone!
b) Retweet, Retweet! - There are quite a few ‘RT Twitters’ starting up like @FemaleBloggerRTand @TheBlogGuideRTto name a few, they will retweet your post out to their followers, so make sure to copy them in to your promotional tweets. Just remember with Twitter not to spam people with the same thing over and over, keep it fresh and interesting.
c) Twitter chats - Join in using the hashtag for the chat and interact with bloggers with a similar blog niche to yourself, gain lots of knowledge, expertise and of course new blogger friends too.
2. Facebook & Facebook groups
Create a Facebook page for your blog and share every post on there, as you build up ‘likes’ your page views will grow and grow. Facebook also has some awesome groups for bloggers; I’m a member of quite a few. Many of them have threads to promote blog posts, competitions and exchange links. They are a great place to chat to other bloggers and make friends too.
3. Pinterest
Pinterest is fabulous for blog promotion and not used enough! Pin all your key images from blog posts with a link back to the post, make sure you tag this with plenty of keywords. The image will be repinned and shared across a large audience creating lots of backlinks to your blog (check my post on Google Pagerankfor why this is good!) and traffic.
4. G+ Google Plus
Google + is becoming quite popular since GFC lost popularity. Like Facebook or Twitter you can build a loyal following, and promote your blog posts. Also, there are hundreds of blogger communities to join too.
5. Stumble Upon
Stumble Upon is one of the best traffic generators out there! This is a newer one to me too. You can add all of your posts there so people can randomly ‘stumble’ across your content. I'm still in the process of testing this, but I've read many great success stories, in the short time I have been using Stumble Upon I’ve already noticed I’m getting quite a few hits from there, I’ll let you know how it goes!
6. Scheduling
I can’t tell you how important it is to schedule your social media updates. You don’t have to, but would you really want to be on your phone/laptop all day posting links and interesting content? Buffer is the app I use for scheduling tweets and Facebook posts and it’s so handy! Every time I write a blog post I schedule a couple of promotional tweets for the same day, a few days apart, then again a month later. This is a really great way to promote older posts again. For some of my most popular posts I schedule tweets every month or so to give them a boost - just because I wrote them a while ago doesn’t mean they are forgotten! It’s also important to include interest content you’ve seen from other blogs, websites or social media feeds to keep it balanced as it’s about keeping an interesting feed - you don’t want it to seem like self-promotion is all you care about!
So, that’s my top tips for Social Media, I hope it’ll help you in some way! I’ve been writing a whole series of Blogging tips over at FizzyPeaches posts so far include topics such as how to promote a blog post, how to increase your Google PageRank and how to add ‘alt-text’ to your images, if you fancy a little read check it out for more handy tips and tricks ;)
You can also follow Lyndsay else where on social media just below, so be sure to giver her a little follow :)
Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest | Instagram | Bloglovin
Thank you for taking the time read my blog. I hope you enjoyed your visit to JustJulie. I appreciate any comments and reply to all comments.