The other day I was thinking about how much I loved my recent review of Reins Handmade Soaps and wish love how I’ve been able to connect with some companies since starting my blog just over a year ago. Really thinking about it, I realized that opportunity was only granted to me because I’m active on one of my social media outlets. This act sparked my mind and made me think that I should definitely share with you all what I do to expand my blog! I literally started from the bottom and now I’m here with hundreds of followers, doing reviews, receiving free products and reaching a much larger audience than a year ago. How do I do it?
I’ve come up with a few of my tips and tricks that I hope will help you all reach your full blogging potential.
Tip #1: Use Blog Social Media Accounts
Although I have social media accounts for my own personal use as Victoria Mason, I also have a corresponding Instagram, Facebook Fan Page, Pinterest, YouTube and Twitter for my blog The Budget Divaa. I’ve found that marketing my blog on my own personal accounts wasn’t very successful because the people who follow me personally follow me for ME, not my blog. For me, having accounts specifically for my blog allows me to solely promote my blog to people who want to find out more about MY BLOG. Doing this, in my opinion, allows you to truly capture active followers and a real following as opposed to one that is just because your friends on social media happen to like your stuff. Building the foundation for your blog in this way will generate an organic following. I’ve had my blog for just under a year and have a combined social media following that is just shy of 2,000 followers. Those 2,000 people who took the time to follow one of my respective accounts truly wants to learn more about my blog, which is why my views per month and unique visitors have consistently risen since I created my accounts. Bottom line, if you don’t have social media for your blog, GET TO IT!
Tip #2: Stay Active on Social Media
As a college student, I think it’s safe to say nobody knows what staying active is than myself. Exams, homework, meetings, work, then blogging? There’s only so much time in the day, but it’s very important to stay just as active on your social media as you do in you daily life. Now, I will say when it comes to my personal blog social media accounts I haven’t exactly been doing this since I’ve recently been unable to produce quality content on the blog. One thing that definitely helps me is planning out my social media posts ahead of time and scheduling them. Through my Facebook Fan Page, I can sit down and schedule posts for the entire week if I want to and they will all go off at the times I select. I also use DynamicTweets to have reoccurring tweets on my blog’s Twitter account so I stay “active” on there. If I’m planning Instagram posts, I do the exact same thing by using Latergramme to schedule posts so all I have to do the day of is click done on Instagram. Basically, I try to stay active on social media as much as possible by planning things out before they happen. I will say that if you are ABLE to produce content daily on your social media outlets DO IT. To give you all an example, I created the Black Bloggers United Instagram less than two months ago, (which I will be doing a separate blog post on later), and post on them daily. I’ve been using Instagram for my blog for just over five months and post maybe twice a week. As of right now, both have the same amount of followers on Instagram. The end point, if you can post QUALITY content daily, HOP TO IT!
Tip #3: Link EVERYTHANG & Schedule!
As a college student, I know first hand that time is oh so valuable and sometimes we just do not have enough. The best way to make your life easier is to link your accounts to one another so you can simultaneously post to every account you need to in order to promote your site. This is vital because your Instagram followers may be a different crowd than your Twitter & Facebook crowd, so to ensure you reach every single person interested in your blog you have to promote it on every account you have. Along with promoting, the easiest way to stay on top of actually doing the promoting is to schedule your tweets, pins, posts, etc.. As a “budget divaa”, I’m not keen on the idea of paying for services to post on social media for me, but there are a surplus of websites/applications you can use to do all the work for you. For Twitter, I rely on Dynamic Tweets to schedule my tweets and post reoccurring tweets on days when I’m not super active. When it’s time to post to Instagram, I look to the application Latergramme to schedule my Instagram posts so that on the day of all I have to do is hit “Done”. Facebook? They’ve got it figured out already, because on your Facebook Fan page you can schedule tweets by clicking on the drop down arrow of your post. So if you don’t have the time to mastermind everything on the fly, schedule everything out so there’s no hassle on your busy days. Let the applications do the work for you!
I hope this post is helpful to you all and let’s get to growing! At the time that I wrote this post I was apporaching 2,000 COMBINED social media followers and wanted to reach 2,000 by the end of the year. I’m happy to say that by the end of the year my combined social media following was 3,800+ with 2,000 of those followers on Instagram. Growing your social media can happen if you just stick to it. So, what are your social media goals for 2016?
