Social media is very powerful. It is going to stay for a long period of time. Blogging is somewhat an old practice but blogs are still relevant in this age. A quick internet search reveals there are 600 million active blogs on the internet. So the real question for bloggers is can I use social media to drive blog traffic?. Absolutely yes. You can use this guide to understand how to go about using social media to increase blog visitors. Learn from some examples on how to use social media to increase website visitors.

Here is a summary outline:

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What this guide is:

• A general thought structure on how to think about starting and growing on social media for your blog
• A no jargon, plain English starting point how to use social media to drive blog traffic

What this guide is not:

• Top 5 SEO strategies you can use to take your blog to next level
• Best 10 tools to improve your social media follower count.
• …

We think you get the idea now.

By the end of this article, our goal is to see if we can convince you. There is no real hack. Only good work pays off on social media. In fact it is in the best interest of the social media platforms to promote good work.

Want social media to drive blog traffic? First decide which social media platforms will work for your blog

Not all social platforms are created equal

Every social media network is designed for a certain set of users. Each platform serves different kind of needs and for different kind of users. We often fall in the trap and create a brand page in every social media website out there. You really don’t have to do that for your blog. There are many factors that decide which social media suits which blog categories. You do not have to do a SWOT analysis of each factor against each social media website out there. Ask yourself one fundamental question:

What is the original commodity I can attribute to my underlying blog work?

People often misunderstand this and think shy about it. The original commodity can be as simple as pictures of a view from your back yard. The original commodity can also include a story that comes with it.

If you decide to blog about that original commodity , you have some thing very unique to you. original commodity is the only criteria for a blog to get quality traffic.

Lets say you are going to take pictures and talk about changing seasons, migrant birds. Here are possible social media options (not exhaustive) for you:

• Instagram – post great pictures at different times of the day. Add a brief descriptive caption of what the blog article is about.
• Facebook – find relevant bird watcher groups, share your snippets and experiences there.
• Reddit – Find communities who appreciate bird watching. Appreciate other posts. That’s one way to accumulate karma on Reddit. Share your thoughts as well.

Start with the easy and straight-forward social media platforms that makes most sense to you. But do not limit yourself to what seems obvious. Who would have thought a pancake restaurant can use twitter/x to promote their brand?

When you create your account, make it whole:

When you start social media platforms have little information on who you are. But as you post more, they get to know you more. When you create your profile, try to make it clear, simple and descriptive of who you are. Tell the world, the work you do on social media. Take theverge.com for example.

The Verge describes themselves as someone who covers life in the future. They listed them selves as Media & News Company. Shows how old they are. If you share a similar profile, make your profile whole and to the point on social media platforms. This helps the platforms to recommend you to people who follow The Verge.

We are going to create a detailed guide which social media is created for what time of content? soon.

Follow basic principles of social media to promote your blog

Do not trust internet more than you have to

Do not trust internet more than how much you trust your original thinking. There are social media groups vouching flat earth theory, NASA faked moon walk. No wonder if you are led to believe best time to post is a myth. It is also sometimes considered the absolute solution.

the best time to post on social media is the time when your followers (potential followers) are most active. 

• If your target audience are elementary school teachers, do not post your images on Instagram during elementary school timings.
• If your target audience are work at home moms, post them during school hours.

We think you get the idea. Let your original thinking take over what internet thinks. If you google ideal Instagram posting frequency, you will be encouraged to believe three to five times per week. But the key is what is around that statement. it depends on your audience.

We are going to create a detailed topic on myths and realities of social media SEO soon.

To increase blog visitors via social media, stay disciplined

The idea of posting regularly is way too a broad guideline on how to promote your blog on social media.

Post at a frequency that is expected by your potential users.

If your blog is about 3 ingredient healthy salad recipes, mention it in your profile. If you plan to post a recipe every Wednesday, mention it in your profile too. And stick to that discipline. Publish a post every Wednesday.

Take thevegansclub Instagram account for example. They promise their subscribers tons of new recipes everyday. As as starting blogger, you do not have enough time, resources to post tons of recipes everyday. Nevertheless, you can be true about it and set your goals and mention it on your social media profile.

Want to use use social media to increase website visitors? What you are posting is more important than how you post it

The question of how you post is often less important than what you are actually posting. If social media algorithms put more weight on hashtags, it becomes impossible to rank order. This affects the real quality content on their platforms. When you start, do not worry too much about questions like:

• Do reels get more engagement than regular posts?
• Do a video post works better than image post?
• Should I use more hashtags?

But, put emphasis on thinking about your reasons for using the social media platform. Consider what your subscribers can expect. Ask your self questions like

• What is my original commodity I want people to appreciate.
• How can I articulate it (a video or perhaps a photograph? ) and how often I can do it.
• Say it on your profile.
• Follow what you say on your profile.

At first the blogger goal should be to gain traction and you build trust with their audience. You will naturally gain more knowledge. You will also understand how you can share your blog article in different forms on social media.

Do not focus on follower count. Focus on providing value

Buying followers is a real thing in social media world. You can get 10k subscribers/ followers if you are willing to spend some money. But the bought followers mean anything to you?

Rather focus on providing value to your community. It does not really matter if your subscribers count is 10M or 10K or 10.

Interacting with your users/ subscribers is the most powerful way to use social media to drive blog traffic

Respond when someone appreciates/ comments / responds on your work on social media. Interact in a meaningful way. Don’t come across as spam. Social media has people who are critical on many things. Try to be gentle when responding. When you started or in growing phase, remember that your subscribers don’t know you yet. Your goal should be to start understanding your subscribers too. When you understand your existing subscribers, you will understand how you can get more of social media to drive blog traffic. Instagram offers a great way to see who is viewing your stories. This feature is very advantageous when you are starting out. You can leverage Instagram Story Viewer feature to build your loyal engaging subscriber base.

Pro-tip: Before posting, know the best practices to follow for posting Instagram stories.

Also, you do not have to respond to every comment/ opinion on your posts on social media. Take Bill Gates as example. He tweets about his foundation work. However, he only lets people/ users whom he follow to comment on his posts. Mr. Gates knows his time is valuable. His subscribers whom he interact are the people whom he works with outside of x.

So there is no golden rule on whom to and how to interact with your subscribers on social media. One thumb rule is to moderate your interactions on social media. The goal is to make sure that you are understood by your subscribers.

We will write a detailed article on how to respond to comments in social media.

Don’t be afraid to experiment. But don’t experiment too often. Keep a balance to leverage social media to increase website visitors/ blog traffic

There are two fundamental ways to think about experimenting on social media:

• Experiment – change things – if it does not work out – apologize later
• Don’t sell your existing community short

Both the philosophies of experimenting and don’t experiment too often have merits. The goal is to keep a balance.

For example – let’s say your 3 ingredient healthy recipes on social media is doing well. To get more momentum, lets say you have decided to add vegetable shopping tips to your niche. There is nothing wrong in it. You can get extra subscribers from that niche. But you have a responsibility to make sure your quality on your original niche does not go down.

Increase quality of your social media postings to increase blog traffic via social media

The term quality is relative in nature. And is in linear relationship with time. To make something look/ feel better takes iterations. More iterations means more time.

What makes an athlete a professional athlete? They repeat same shot/ foot work / swing / timing multiple times. They do not not get better with every repetition. But with every n repetitions, they will discover something, change the technique and come out better.

You can write quality posts on social media. But you don’t have to be in an analysis paralysis mode when it comes to social media. Start with what you got. But basic quality checks go a long way.

• No spelling mistakes
• Check for grammar
• No copy paste in entirety. You can do re-wordings parts of post.
• Attribute copyrights

Without spending too much time perfecting some post, take that first step. See how it goes.

We are going to create a detailed topic on this soon. How to balance between quality of posting vs frequency of postings.

Want to use social media to drive blog traffic? Keep consistency – between your blog and your social media creatives

Perhaps this is one of best yet simple strategies you can follow to reinforce your brand. Again, a set of simple checks go a long way. If any of your subscribers get curious and visit your blog, they should perceive the continuity.

• Use similar font and sizing between your blog and social media images
• Keep your logo proportions similar
• Re purpose your blog articles as bullets/ snippets in social media postings
• Attribute copyrights in proper format and stay consistent between blog and social media postings
• Keep consistency with the flow of the story. Organize your story with headings/ sub headings in the article. Use the same flow in social media narrative.

Also, We are going to create a detailed topic on this soon. How to keep consistency in your social media posting. How socialDapr.com can help.

Plan a schedule and stay disciplined about it. Over time you will see an increase blog visitors via social media

If you promise a new recipe every Wednesday on your social profile. Please make sure you deliver on that promise as much as you can. By schedule means, we are not proposing a scheduler tool. If you google for social medial schedule, you will find many articles. These articles try to sell you a scheduler tool to auto post your social media posts.

Here we are not proposing a auto scheduler tool. By schedule means, we are proposing:

consider planning your calendar ( a week ?) to finish article topic, write, publish to your blog, work on social media creatives, summarize post captions. Leave some time to engage with your subscribers.

It is better to post once a week while maintaining your checklist. It is not beneficial to post every day without interacting with your existing subscribers.

As you increase your productivity to keep up with your checklist, you can increase frequency of your postings. We will talk about increasing productivity later in detail.

Understand how social media algorithms work and get better at it with every post

On social media platforms, algorithms are mainly designed to amplify information that sustains engagement – The conversations

Pro-tip: leverage templates to boost your consistency over time. Consistency contributes to more engagement at your social media profile level.

In simpler words, social media platforms promote posts to people. They target users whom they think are biased to learn from the content social media outlets promote. This strategy helps the social media platforms to get returning customers.

This kind of strategy allows promotion of PRIME,” for prestigious, in-group, moral and emotional information” information. They keyword prestigious looks interesting in the PRIME information strategy. The question for bloggers is then are you the prestigious personality in the niche? You do not have to be one in the beginning of your journey. You can can become one. As pointed above in the article, try to keep up with:

• Adhering to basic principles of posting – primarily stay disciplined.
• Quality standards you set for your blog and social media account
• Productivity goals you set for yourself.

We will propose a checklist of activities to gain traction on social media.

Increase your productivity on social media

In the long run, productivity matters

By now, we hope you are positive about how you can use social media to drive blog traffic. But in the long run as economist Paul Krugman puts it:

Productivity isn’t everything, but, in the long run, it is almost everything. 

When you start on social media to promote your blog, it is okay to take it slow. Get familiar with the rules. Understand your users. Reinforce your brand with templates. But as you get into a habit, you must know the list of activities you do on a regular basis. Then, you must start thinking about getting more productive. Focus on implementing those set of productivity hacks getting better at using social media to drive blog traffic.

To increase blog visitors with social media at scale, you need to use proper tool for proper work

Tools are here to help. But the problem is there are too many of them. Before you even think of subscribing a tool, think of the activities where you spend most of the time. Here is definitive list of social media activities where you can consider tools increase productivity:

• Brainstorm on content idea – search here
• Content creation – search here
• identification, research, documenting – post description, hashtags, tagging – search here
• Make social media creatives/ graphics/ cards – search here
• Team collaboration tools – If you have a team – search here
• Publishing content – scheduling/ managing notifications – search here
• Promotion strategy – research/ action – search here
• Lead generation tools for promotions (influence marketing) – search here
• Marketing – Paid ads/ promotional posts – search here
• Cross posting / re-posting your content – search here
• Monitoring user comments/ interactions – search here
• Track social media growth patterns – search here
• Track growth of your blog – search here

We are not going to recommend which tools you can use. The marketing teams at those respective product companies are already busy promoting them. You can click on the links next to the activities listed about to search list of specific tools. Nonetheless, here is a set of criteria you can use to shortlist a tool:

• Is there a free trail I can use to get started?
• Does it support multiple forms of functionality? e.g. image and video creation.
• How good is the customer support?
• Does the tool do one job well or it promises many activity automation?

We are going to create a detailed topic on this soon. Not a list of tools but the criteria you can consider to decide to shortlist your tool search.

Learn from how others are using social media to drive blog traffic

We took a look at some prominent already successful blogs and media outlets. They have used social media to drive blog traffic. We noticed 3 primary areas where they excelled:

• How their blog promotional/ informational graphics is consistent and is with a professional look
• How precise and exact in what they include in social media content.
• Show how varying and interesting their blog is via different categories of content

Read through this to understand how you can keep consistency, reinforce brand and bring loyalty on Instagram with templates. You can leverage socialDapr color wheel to decide on a brand color palette for your blog.

Show consistency

Take a look how politico shows their articles on their Instagram page. Politico includes the article title based on the kind of content. They also include the feature image and their logo in their social media posts. They also include the category and author.

Pro-tip : You can get a feature image (high resolution images) for your blog posts for free. Know the top 20 sources you can leverage.

Now take a look how vox.com shows their work / articles on their Instagram page. One thing that is common to all their posts is their distinctive headline. They are also proud to show their brand logo.

Be precise

Neil Patel points out in his how to do social media. Setting up your posts for success is one of many things in how to do social media.

He points out great content along with great promotion strategy is important for success on social media. But what is the definition of great content?. A simple answer is a content so unique to you is a great content. As a passionate blogger, we already strive for a great content in the form of a written blog.

Cnet is known for their great tech reviews. They leverage Instagram/ Facebook to reach young readers and early adopters of new tech. Over time, Cnet gained trust among their readers overtime with authentic reviews, articles. They always maintained discipline in precisely opining on what they are reviewing. 

Want social media to drive blog traffic? – Show variance in your postings

One of the hardest decisions bloggers make when they decide to blog is this. How many article categories should they include?

For many small team bloggers, publishing quality content itself is a challenging task. Managing quality across various categories of content and come across as frequent blogger is an extremely difficult task. When you have decided on the category count, you definitely want to show it off on social media. You also want to show off your work on creating content on social media. Blog readers appreciate varying content and get curious in your blog when they perceive your content as varying and interesting.

indiatimes.com is a blog/ website that write on everything that is trending. When you have such a broad theme for your blog, it is hard to decide the ideal number of categories. This decision can be challenging. Instagram offers a great platform. It lets you show off how varying your blog content is without being perceived as overwhelming. indiatimes.com decided to post on Instagram with one simple template while showing article category.

We are going to create a detailed article on this soon. examples of how tech blogs do their social media, how home improvement tips bloggers do social media etc.

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Social media is powerful and still relevant for blogging. Leveraging it can increase blog traffic. We hope this guide on how to use social media to drive blog traffic helped you. In summary, decide which platforms work for your blog, post consistently, focus on providing value, and interact with users. Experiment wisely, keep up with posts quality, and align blog and social media. Plan a schedule, understand algorithms, and learn from others for success.