Make the Most of Sharing to Every Social Network (Without Wasting Time)

Would you like to build more traffic to your blog? I thought you might!

The thing is, most bloggers are after organic search traffic (and for a good reason) but they completely ignore other traffic-building methods. Yes, search traffic is easier to scale but it is never a good idea to put all eggs into one basket. You need more traffic sources, and one of the most obvious of those is social media and making a habit of sharing to every social network.

Yes, you can scale social media traffic by creating your own routine! Here’s mine.

Twitter: Schedule a Lot

(Time needed: ~15 minutes per URL)

The lifetime of a tweet is extremely short: Once you tweet something, it will be seen for 15-20 minutes on average and only by a fraction of your followers.

Therefore tweeting the same thing several times is essential to expand the pool of people that will be able to see it.

Luckily, there are lots of tools (including Twitter’s own Tweetdeck) that allow scheduling tweets far into the future so you can make sure your content is tweeted weeks and months after you publish it on your blog.

This is where you can experiment with various formats and tricks to get more of your followers’ attention:

• Tweet your URL tagging every person or brand you mentioned in your content: This will attract all those Twitter users to your tweet and they are likely to engage
• Tweet your URL as a Twitter thread, one tip / step / quote / takeaway at a time
• Retweet your earlier tweet with a comment: This will bring your old Tweet with the URL back on top of your feed
• Tweet your URL with a visual quote attached. Native images on Twitter (those you upload to the platform) tend to get more engagement than just URLs.

You can easily create those visual quotes using text-to-image tools which also make it incredibly easy to resize your image to re-use on other platforms like Pinterest (more on this below):

Here are many more great tools to create social media graphics.

Facebook: Try Not to Share Your URL

(Time needed: ~15 minutes per URL)

Facebook is notorious for disliking updates that are nothing but a comment and a URL. They just don’t like their users clicking links and leaving the platform.

You may have noticed that updates with a link in them tend to earn only a fraction of engagement your usual Facebook updates tend to generate.

To overcome that, don’t just flatly share your URL on Facebook. Instead create an image or a video and link to your article from a comment. You can invite friends or followers to click your link in the comment as well.

LinkedIn: Just Share Your URL

(Time needed: ~5 minutes per URL)

LinkedIn will not work for everyone but it is not a bad traffic driver in the B2B niche. Surprisingly, there are not many tricks you can or should use on LinkedIn. More often than not I simply share my URL and it generates some organic clicks without me doing anything else.

LinkedIn used to dislike posts with links (just like Facebook does now) but it seems like they have changed their algorithm, and these days simply sharing a link will work just as well as sharing an image or a video.

If you have some time, you can also use a quick trick Ryan described here: Grab some takeaways from your article and put together a presentation to use on LinkedIn to generate more views and engagements.

Pinterest: Find (and/or Create) Groups to Share to

(Time needed: ~15-20 minutes per URL)

They say Pinterest can bring about lots of traffic which would be coming for weeks or months after you share something. (I’ve never had the time or energy to build my Pinterest profile to that level, so I cannot deny or confirm that theory.)

I did find that sharing to active group boards may bring quite a few clicks, so ask around and try to find some to join. If you cannot find any, create your own and invite your peers to join. That’s what I did.

And most importantly, create vertical images to share on Pinterest: That’s the only way to build up some visibility there.

The optimal Pinterest image size is 1000 x 1500px, or any larger image as long as an aspect ratio is 2:3.

Instagram: Remind Your Friends of Your URL in Your Bio

(Time needed: ~20 minutes per URL)

Instagram is tricky because it doesn’t really allow clickable links anywhere but the bio. You can still build some clicks from that platform if you:

• Create a cool video to share as an update (there are quite a few great tools for that)
• Write a caption that would make your followers intrigued to know more and invite them to click the link in the bio

If you have more than 10K followers and a verified Instagram account, you can also add clickable links to your stories. This is a great idea too.

Social Sharing Tools to Help Scale the Process

I am not one of those social media users who shy away from scaling or using tools to try and automate at least some part of the process.

I’ve tried dozens of tools and lately I have reduced my tool set to these two platforms.

Viral Content Bee

(Time needed: ~5 minutes per URL)

Viral Content Bee is the platform I’ve founded, but I am also its most active user. Every single article I write is submitted to the platform for others to share.

The beauty of the platform is that users get to pick what they want to share, so it is a great way to generate some organic shares and clicks. With it, you don’t have to build up a huge following to generate some social media traffic. You can get other people to share your content.

As time permits, I would go ahead and engage with those updates other people share with my links. This helps my reach and builds stronger connections to people who choose to promote my content.

Agorapulse

(Time needed: ~5 minutes per URL)

Agorapulse is a social media management dashboard that allows users to post updates to multiple social media platforms. I wish I were more organized with using it but it is a real time saver in times when I am leaving for a vacation and need to make sure there’s some content being published on my social media networks while I am away.

One of the most useful features of Agorapulse is an ability to share to multiple Facebook groups, pages and Linkedin business profiles. This makes it possible to keep your business entities at least somewhat active when you are particularly busy.

Finteza

Finteza is a web analytics tool which will help you identify your best-working tactics. It focuses on conversion optimization helping you find your most effective traffic sources:

Last but Not Least…

This article is only about sharing your own URL on social media in order to generate some traffic. Yet, I don’t want it to sound like it’s all you need to do to get some tangible results from social media.

Let’s not forget:

Create and Publish Other Types of Content 

(Time needed: ~2 hours a week)

Just sharing links is not enough. You need to post other types of content to keep your audience engaged. These include motivational updates, videos, memes, etc.

Using innovative tools to create content will help you make this part more doable.

These days you can create content using Artificial Intelligence and put together professional visual content.

Here are a few ideas for non-promotional content you can easily create and publish on your social media channels:

• Share your opinion on trending news (with the hashtag). Buzzsumo Trending is a great tool to monitor those trends
• Create a motivational visual quote. #TuesdayMotivation and #MotivationMonday are great hashtags to use within this post
• Post your personal photo or video. Personal posts giving a glimpse of your life make your social accounts easier to relate to and increase organic engagement
• Ask a question: People love answering questions on social media, so you may find some great engagement when simply creating an update asking a question or inviting feedback. Text Optimizer is a great tool to find cool and popular questions to ask:

Engage and Talk Back

(Time needed: ~30 minutes to 2 hours a week)

Broadcasting on social media will result in poorly engaged and decreasing following. You need to spend some time talking to your followers: Comment, retweet, etc. This is the part that’s very hard to organize or scale.

Try to allocate 2-3 hours a week by simply being there on social media helping others and contributing useful content.

The good news is that being active on social media will likely result in many more benefits, like finding business partners, curating great customer reviews and discovering new marketing opportunities.

Talking to people is a great way to find new followers and communities. To find and interact with niche questions outside of your immediate circle, try monitoring questions on Twitter: [keyword ?]

[Just make sure there is a space before the question mark]

Spend 20-30 minutes a week answering these questions and interacting with your peers on Twitter.

To sum up: Here’s where to share your article once you hit Publish:

• Using image and video creation tools put together several visual assets (images and videos) in different sizes to use on social media. Both tools allow one-click resizing, so you can easily re-use the same assets on multiple platforms
• Schedule lots of social media updates to promote the same URLs many times on Twitter. You can use multiple formats for that if you can afford the time to schedule those manually. Or you can use Drumup to schedule 10-15 tweets with one click of a mouse.
• Try not to share your URLs on Facebook to foten as Facebook buries updates with links. Instead create a post with an image or a video and share your URL in the comment section
• Collaborate with influencers and peers to organize a group board and share your content there. That’s the best way to build some quick traffic without spending days and months on building up your Pinterest profile
• Share your URL on Linkedin. If you have extra time, consider creating a quick presentation that would do better on Pinterest
• On Instagram, you can re-use your video you created for Facebook. Don’t forget to write up a good caption inviting followers to click your link in the bio to read more.
• Use Agorapulse and Viral Content Bee to scale social media sharing and generate more traffic
• Spend some time on a weekly basis interacting with other people on social media and posting non-linked content like videos, polls and photos