Category: Social Media

Social Media Marketing Strategy
Revive Old Post To Increase Blog Traffic

If you already have a blog site for a while, then you probably have a lot of articles posted. Think about the amount of money and resources you have spent on so many good contents in the past that are now lost in your website’s archives.

New visitors to your website hardly ever go to very old posts. You might have posted amazing guides, infographics, or knowledgeable articles on topics that are still valuable.

But they are probably getting forgotten since you didn’t update them, or just because you have so much more content posted afterward.

Here’s the thing. Your old posts can still be refined and valuable. You may start re-sharing your old posts via social media and get an amazing response.

To do this you need to

• Identify Potential Old Blog Posts
• Re-work On The Selected Potential Blogs
• Start Re-Sharing Your Content For Traffic

Now let us learn how to do all these in the best way possible, step-by-step.

Identify Potential Old Blog Posts

Follow the steps below to identify the most potential old blogs.

Step1 – Find Old Posts With Good Keywords

1. Check back through your archives and round up all of your old blog posts (that are no longer getting traffic).
   
2. Separate the ones that are evergreen, i.e., knowledgeable for everyone. For example, listicles of a few best plugins, or guide to content marketing, and similar posts.
   
3. You can use special tools to detect any old posts on your blog. For example, one such tool is Website SEO Checker by Sitechecker.
   
4. Now, list their keywords on a document and use an SEO tool to find out which keywords among them are currently ranking high on SERPs. (This is because, you will be reviving them not just for Social Media, but also for normal SERPs.) You may use good tools such as Ahref or SEM Rush.
   
5. Rearrange the blog topics and URLs on a document, based on the highest performing keyword to the lowest reasonably performing keyword.
   
   **Not all of your old posts had good keywords, and some of the keywords used back then are no longer usable.

You can immediately consider the top ten blogs with good keywords for reviving.

Step 2 – Separate Old Posts Based On Collaboration Opportunity

Once you separate the blogs that are in the top ten in terms of keyword popularity, the next is to identify potential blogs based on collaboration opportunities from the remaining blogs.

From these blogs, you will separate the ones where you have some opportunity to collaborate for better results.

By collaboration opportunity, I mean getting backlinks.

Let me explain.

Let’s say you have written a blog on “10 Best WooCommerce plugins in WordPress”. You can surely update it with the latest best plugins to start getting traction again.  

However, you can do something even better.

You can reach out to some of the latest good WooCommerce plugins, and offer them a collaboration.

You can offer a company to include their plugin(s) on this list with a “do follow” link to their product page, while they will also give you a “do follow” link to your product(s) on one of their articles.

“The best way to build up the online visibility of your business or website is by building relationships with your industry peers. Links will naturally occur as a result of these partnerships.”

Donald Chan, founder of MarTech Wise

Now, many will say “backlink exchange” can be penalized by Google. But not if you do it smartly, especially when these premium links offer a solid ROI, enhancing your site’s value without direct link exchanges. Remember, quality always prevails over quantity in such strategies.

You will be penalized if they give a backlink to the same article of yours, on which you gave a backlink to them, i.e., a direct link exchange.

Let me explain with an example.

Suppose you have a post, Article 1. And another site has a post, Article 2.

Now, let’s say you gave them a backlink for their post, Article 2, on your post, Article 1. And they in return gave you a backlink for your post, Article 1, on their post, Article 2.

This is a direct backlink exchange and will, most likely, be penalized by Google.

However, if it’s not a direct exchange, there is no penalty for it.

Let’s say you have a post, Listicle 1, and a product page, Product 1. And another site has a post, Listicle 2, and a product page, Product 2.

So you can include their page, Product 2, on your post, Listicle 1. And in return, they can include your page, Product 1, on their post, Listicle 2.

Here, there is no direct exchange of links, and is a good collaboration.

So go ahead and separate the blogs with a potential collaboration opportunity.

**Even if you do not do a direct link exchange, frequent exchange of links with the same site is also seen as direct promotion and disliked by Google. So try not to exchange more than 2 links with the same site in a month. 

**Also many do collaborations with affiliate links. Keep in mind, Google can trace affiliate links and often penalizes sites with too many affiliate links in them. So do not create any posts with too many affiliate links in them.

Step 3 – Find Old Blog Posts Based On Potential Main Content

Now, for the remaining blogs, you need to identify potential blogs based on lucrative content.

1. Open each blog and give a quick read.
   
2. Find out if there is more opportunity with this article by improving keywords and content.
   
   First, check if it is possible to re-write it for a similar keyword that performs above average. In this case, you can be creative and think of a couple of relevant keywords yourself and then check if they rank higher on SERPs, compared to their current keyword.
   
   You can also directly get suggestions from SEO tools. For example, Ahref gives you more keyword ideas that are ranking high for any keyword term you analyze. So you may choose one from there if it sounds relevant to your content.
   
3. It’s also best to choose articles among these that will need the least amount of research when re-writing, i.e., you can write about it on your own, without much help from other similar contents or SERP research.

From here, choose around 5 articles that seem potential to rewrite into good content.

So now, you will have around 15 to 20 blogs on your hand that you can work on to revive.

**I am assuming you have many articles, but it’s also okay if you have fewer. Just follow the steps here. The number of blogs is not too important unless you have more than 20 old blogs to revive.

Re-work On The Selected Potential Blogs

In order to revive old posts, you have to make changes to the posts.

Some people simply start sharing the old posts on social media or via e-mail and expect that this social traffic will add value to the post. But that is totally wrong.

SERPs do not rank contents that are not up-to-date. Even if you get a sudden surge of traffic through social media, Google will still crawl and compare your post with old crawling data. And if the content has no change, then the post will still be ranked low.

• First of all, Google values referrals and new backlinks.
• Second, Google wants to present the latest data that are still valuable, to its audience. So along with backlinks, Google also values updates.
• Third, Google values organic traffic over click-through/referred traffic from another site or social site.

So it is a must that you put some effort into revamping your old posts.

Here are a few things you can do to get better results out of each post.

1. Improve the featured image

The old featured image you used is probably no longer trendy in terms of design.

Create a new featured image with improved design.

Changing the featured image with the latest trendy design will give you the following advantages:

• This will be an update that SERPs will see as a major change.
• A newer design will be more engaging with readers.
• The post will be more attractive on social media (if you do not create a separate image for social media).

2. Work on Improving Post Permalinks (URLs)

With time, the trend for setting a permalink has also improved.

Here are a few things to do:

1. Check and remove any counting numbers or years from the permalink.
   
   For example, let’s say you have a post with the permalink:
   
   https://www.yourwebsite.com/10-best-checkout-plugins-2011
   
   Here, “10” is a counting number so remove it. This will allow you to add more than ten plugins to the post if you want to, thus removing the limit.
   
   Also “2011” indicates which year this is for. Remove it so that you can rework on the post every year with improved data. Thus carrying the post value along the way.
   
   No need to make new posts for the same topic every year.
   
2. Nowadays, we prefer that the shorter a permalink, the better. So, remove any extra text on the permalink that is not necessary to indicate what this post is about and that is not part of the keyword.
   
   For example, let’s say you have a post with the keywords, “SEO tactics” and permalink:
   
   https://www.yourwebsite.com/the-best-seo-tactics-that-you-never-knew
   
   Here, at first “the” is not necessary. Any post with “the” at the beginning, do not include it on the permalink.
   
   The “that-you-never-knew” part was simply a hook, used to attract readers, in the title. It is not necessary on the permalink.
   
   So you may keep the “best-seo-tactics” portion. You can also remove the “best” from the link if you want and it won’t have any effect as long as the keyword is available on the permalink. But it’s best to keep one or two words along with the keyword to make more sense.
   
   Also, you may exclude any helping words or unnecessary prepositions in the link. For example, instead of “best-plugins-in-wordpress”, you may remove “in” and set the permalink to “best-plugins-wordpress”.
   
3. Any changes you make to the permalink will mean that it will be considered as a new post by SERPs, which is a bit bad since it will lose all the value it had in the past. So it is best to use a 301 redirection from the old link to the new one.

3. Update the Content with the Latest Data

Since this post was lost, there is a possibility that the data in this post could be back-dated or obsolete.

So here’s what you should do to improve the content:

1. Separate all headings within the post. Search on Google with each heading and find out the current data available. Read a few articles and collect important points.
   
2. Compare the data on those articles with yours and find out
   
   • What data you have, that has changed over the years, i.e. back-dated data.
      
   • Any information you have, that is good but missing from the other popular posts.
     
   • Any new ideas that you haven’t used in your post.
     
3. Use these data to create a more refined, updated content based on each section. While improving, keep in mind, you are not updating this post for your sake only; your post must be helpful to whoever reads it.

Once the content is updated with the latest data, you can be sure to get more attention from SERPs.

4. Restructure the content with the latest trends

The structure of content matters a lot these days. People no longer like to read essays or long descriptive paragraphs.

Even if you improve your content data, if you do not restructure it, it will result in a higher bounce rate, i.e., people will leave your blog without reading most of the content.

According to SERPs, a higher bounce rate is considered as an indication that the content is either not useful, or not attractive to readers, hence bad content.

Here are a few suggestions on what you should do.

● A Small Introductory Summary

Make the introduction short but precise on what this is about, and what people will be learning from it. You can use a small section stating what they will learn after reading this article. Here’s an example:

You may create bullet points to give a summary of the things viewers will learn. This part will help the reader to understand if they will find what they were looking for. You might take the help of an AI-powered chat PDF to streamline the summarization process, and quickly extract key insights and takeaways from the document.

● Table Of Content

Include a table of contents to allow readers to jump to different sections in the post.

Here’s an example of how an attractive blog may look at the beginning. You can see the summary of what a reader will learn, followed by the table of contents to jump to different sections.

The “table of contents” is necessary because, sometimes, a reader does not wish to read the whole post; he/she is probably looking for something specific, which is a small part of your article.

So a table of content will help the reader understand and read what he/she needs.

● Engaging Blog Structures

Apply more engaging structures such as numbered bullet points, tables, and columns. Rather than reading paragraphs, people find it easier to read bullet points.

So, create a proper mix of paragraphs and bullet points throughout the post for a better connection with readers. For example, here is a portion of an article regarding US online shops for clothing.

You can see that it has a heading, a numbered sub-heading, a small paragraph, and bullet points to explain a few details.

This is an ideal structure that readers find more attractive.

● Use Tables Or Columns

Use tables and columns when listing a lot of points for a topic, or when creating comparisons. Here is an example of using tables.

● More Media Throughout

Use More Media ThroughOut. Images and videos are always more engaging than plain text. So it’s best to use more images and videos.

On top of that, you can always convert some images to video online to make them more engaging.

For every heading section, you may use an image to represent that section.

You can check out this post for learning how to create better videos for your business.

If you have a summary video of the whole post, you may include that right after the introduction or the table of contents.

Here’s an example:

The idea is, to try to include a media for every 300 words written. This will keep the reader more engaged. So, an article with 1200 words, technically, should have a minimum of 4-5 images.

Any section of a post that is very long, you can input one image at the beginning and one image in the middle, to avoid boring the readers.

● Avoid using dull images

 Often people take a few image elements from online, place them on a colored background, and then use that as a section image, which is a terrible thing to do.

People lose interest just because of these images.

Here’s an example:

This article talks about things to look at when hiring a web designer. However, the images are like the one above. You can see that there are image elements in the middle, and a green background; an image that piques no interest.

Plus, you may notice another error. The image is placed above the section heading. It should rather be placed below the section heading.

Here’s an example of how it should be:

This is a section out of an article that talks about the advantages of using a virtual tour on a website for realtors.

You can clearly see the heading of the section, followed by an image that is relevant to the section, and not at all boring.

**It is not necessary for the images to be so graphical, but at least it should be relevant to the section and not completely blunt. Maybe use color gradients or at least use images that won’t repel readers.

You can also include infographics or PowerPoint slides to present statistics on the topic. to present statistics on the topic. In a later article, we will learn about the creation and implementation of infographics.

Start Re-Sharing Your Content For Traffic

Once you are ready with the new and improved content, it’s time to start working on getting traffic on it again.

So here are the steps you should follow.

1. Change the Post Date As Appropriate

Sometimes, after you have completely revamped a blog post, you may change the publish date to a recent date.

This is often a good idea for blogs that didn’t perform well for a very long time, or never performed well in the past at all.

In this case, SERPs will completely ignore any old crawling data and consider this as a new post.

So, in this case, take the following actions:

• make a change to the permalink of the post,
• then set a 301 redirection from the old link to the new one,
• and follow up by changing the publish date to a recent one.

This way, in most cases, Google will still consider any old crawling value the post had in the old permalink and will consider the updated post as new content.

2. Share On Social Media To Kick-start traffic

Now that you are ready with your content with a complete makeover, it’s time to start applying Social Media Marketing.

1. First one all, follow the Effective Tactics To Optimize Social Share For Bloggers. In this way, your social shares with result in more engagements.
   
2. Then follow the Tactics to Automate Social Sharing. There you will get useful social automation tactics to follow, and you will learn about a reliable social automation tool, Social Booster.
   
3. Set schedules for the blogs to be shared at the right hours using the social automation tool.
   
4. Reach out to influencers to make social shares.
   
5. Reach out to any sites for whom you gave links, for social shares.
   
6. If you have any collaboration plan then inform them right away and finalize the deal.
   
7. Boost the post if it’s evergreen content.
   
8. About 2-3 days after your social share, e-mail it out to your subscribers.
   
9. Post a summary video of the blog on Youtube and put the post link in the video description.
   
10. One week after sharing on social media, share the Youtube video on social media and add the post link in the caption.
    
11. Schedule automated retweets (on Twitter) of the post after every week, for 3 weeks.
    
12. Make sure to reply actively to any comments.

And that’s it. Follow this procedure for every post you revive. Within a couple of months, your old posts will start getting good organic traffic, as a result of your patience and hard work.

Final Thoughts

Social Media Marketing is a broad topic, and one of its parts is to revive old posts and share them on social media.

If all the steps mentioned here are followed properly, then you can easily rely on social media to help you revive old posts with good traffic.

In the next guide, we will discuss how to create videos, which you can share on social media to get the highest reach and engagements.

Guide To Social Media Marketing — Strategies Part 3
Use Social Media Automation For Successful Blogging

Once you complete working on any content, it’s best to start working on the next content as soon as possible to make the most out of your content plan.

Sharing your newly published blogs on social media may take some time as you have to post them on several social media accounts.

Plus, it’s quite tiring to manually log in and post on every social site, every time you wish to share your content.

So, to reduce this hassle, you should start implementing Social Media Automation.

Social media automation is one of the latest trends to follow in order to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of blogging.

You can focus more on creating content and spend less time making social posts, while still getting a high social reach.

After reading this article, you will learn about

• Why use social media automation?
• Actionable tactics to automate social sharing
• Guide to a reliable social automation tool for WordPress

 So let’s get started.

Why Use Social Media Automation?

As a blogger, a social media automation tool will help you share blogs on social channels without having to log in to every social site.

The is idea is to stop wasting time manually logging in and posting on social media for every content you produce.

Rather use a social media automation tool that is easy to use and efficient.

There are several tools out there that will allow you to share your published content on all of your social channels with just a single click. Some of these tools might slow up your device for that you can always use defragmentation to free up more space for smooth usage.

Eventually, you will be producing more content and still get social traffic without any complications.

Actionable Tactics To Automate Social Sharing 

Now, let us look at a few actional tactics that you can use to get the most out of social media automation.

i. Use A Reliable Tool To Make Instant Shares

One perk of social media automation is to share your blog content on social media as soon as you publish it.

Let’s say you have a content plan to write two long articles in a week. Now, to maintain quality, you will already be using a lot of time in researching for useful data, and constructing a proper structure, let alone creating content properly.

Once you publish the article, if you are moderately active on social media, then chances are you have accounts in over 4 social channels.

Now, it sure takes some time to manually access and post the article and set the caption over and over again.

You would rather prefer to start working on the next article.

In this case, you may use a reliable social automation tool that is integrated with your social channels. You can simply set the caption once and with just a click, your published post will be shared on social media.

You will find great tools such as SocialBee, Buffer, Hubspot, or Hootsuite to help you with social media automation.

However, if you have a WordPress site, then you should try using Social Booster.

It’s a social automation plugin for sharing WordPress content (pages, blogs, images, video, products, etc) on multiple social sites at the same time.

The best part about this plugin is that it will allow you to instantly share your published post directly from the post edit page.

You don’t even need to leave your article’s edit page. Just Publish, scroll down to the plugin options, and share on your social media with a single click. 

You can also use social automation tools to schedule posts to be shared on specific hours and days, which is very handy. We will be discussing tactics regarding this matter within this article.

**I will give a guide about Social Booster later on in this article.

Another effective method you can follow is reviving old blog posts. You can revamp old blog posts that are no longer performing, and schedule shares (resharing) on your social media for great results. We will discuss this matter in detail in a later article.

ii. Schedule Social Shares On The Most Productive Hours

The performance of content shared on social media depends a lot on the day and the hour you share it.

It is important to consider the audience you are trying to reach and the channel you are sharing on. For a thorough understanding of these dynamics, reviewing a detailed social media report can provide valuable insights.

For example, according to Sproutsocial, the best time to share posts on Facebook is 11:00 A.M. to 01:00 P.M., Wednesday.

There are more data for other social channels such as Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn and people on different social channels have different times when they are more active.

• Read Sprout Social’s report here.

Other than the basic active hours when you should post, you can also choose the hours based on what type of audience you are trying to reach, whether businesses or consumers.

If you are trying to reach businesses, then you have to consider that businessmen are mostly busy and hardly browse during working hours, except for a few specific times.

For example, as per Hootsuite’s report, people in businesses are more active on LinkedIn

• during the early hours between 07:45 A.M. to 10:45 A.M. 
• on lunch breaks such as at around 12:45 P.M. 
• during the end of the shift at about 05:45 P.M.

Moreover, they are more active on Wednesdays and Thursdays (since the rest of the days are usually packed with more work).

Reaching consumers will work best at slightly different hours.

According to a survey report from CoSchedule, consumers are more active on Twitter in the morning between 08:00 A.M. to 10:00 A.M., at noon i.e. 12:00 P.M., and late on the day between 07:00 P.M. to 09:00 P.M.

We will be discussing more with the exact best hours to post for every social channel at a later article.

You will find many such reports available online, and they will mostly be similar with slight differences in hours. You may consider following these timings as they have proven to work for many.

So, every content you wish to share, use a social media automation tool to schedule the post for your social media marketing. Set the schedules according to the best day and hours as per various social channels, mentioned in these statistics.

You may use Social Booster to schedule any WordPress content to be shared on your social channels at your desired time and day.

You won’t have to manually post on social media even if you have published the content a lot sooner than the best hours.

In fact, it will allow you to schedule the post for sharing at your preferred time on your preferred social channel, right from the post edit page or from the plugin dashboard.

iii. Schedule Consecutive Post Shares For Promotional Campaigns

Often it is necessary to share the same post multiple times in a span of a few days for maximum results.

Yes, you can manually re-share or retweet on social sites like Facebook or Twitter. However, that will require you to log in and manually share the post for each social channel.

Rather, use your social media automation tool to schedule the articles to be shared on the social channels, on a few consecutive days at the best hours.

Let me explain why you should share your post on consecutive days.

Let’s say, as an example, during Black Friday, you may create a post to display your latest discount plans for your prospects.

Now, there are tons of others that are sharing similar discount posts on the occasion of the event. Within a few hours of sharing your post, it will no longer be visible on people’s timelines.

But, it is most likely that you are running a discount campaign for about a couple of days to a week. So it is necessary that people see your shared post more frequently.

The best option here is to schedule consecutive post shares for a span of a few days.

You may use an automation tool to schedule your discount post to be shared on your social channels every day (on the most active hours) until the number of days you wish to run your discount campaign. 

That way, your article will appear as a new post every day on the timelines of your followers. 

Tip:
Some social channels see this as spamming if you share the same post for too many days. So we advise you to share such consecutive posts with a day’s gap in between every post. So in a span of 5 days, you may share it on the 1st day, 3rd day, and 5th day.

The schedule share option of the plugin, Social Booster, will allow you to create multiple schedules for the same post, which you can keep track of via the content calendar on the plugin dashboard.

Now, throughout this article, I mentioned Social Booster. Let me give you a short overview and guide on this social media automation plugin for WordPress.

Using A Tool For Social Media Automation

Social media management could be a great hustle if you don’t have the right tools.

However, Social Champ would be a great choice if you are looking for an affordable social media management tool.

Providing you with a handful of excellent automation features, it has got some unique and impressively defined features on the basis of which a business can manage its social profiles.

From the bulk uploading of content to the scheduling of the posts, Social Champ supports various personas like startups, SMBs, and agencies with the best automation features.

You can bring all the major social media profiles (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google My Business, Pinterest) to one dashboard and can connect them all together for future postings.

It lets you edit and create the posts instantly with the available built-in platforms of Canva, Crello, Pixelied, and Wave videos.

How fun and easy it is to manage all the social profiles of your business in one place with Social Champ!

Click here to get started with Social Champ.

Final Thoughts

One of the latest trends in Social Media Marketing is implementing social media automation when sharing blogs on social channels.

The schedule feature is specifically useful as it takes time and effort to remember and share your post on various social media manually. Rather, set schedules, and the post will be shared on the social media channels automatically. 

I suggest you try using Social Booster and hopefully you will see higher results soon.

In the next article, we will discuss how you can revive your old blog posts and increase website traffic.

Guide To Social Media Marketing — Strategies Part 2
Optimize A Social Media Post To Promote Your Blogs Effectively

If you run a blog, then you have a community of readers and other bloggers around it.

They definitely love to read your blogs and articles, however, most of them will not visit your blog too often unless they get a trigger.

Yes, you might have an e-mail list where you can send updates on new content. However, that is limited to those who subscribed.

The social media world is limitless.

Besides conducting SEO and other basic marketing tactics, it is important to promote your blog posts and content on social media.

Few good reasons to promote blog posts on social media:

• Almost everyone uses social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. And there are millions of such users that are interested in any particular same niche.
• In social media, there is the advantage of notifications. If you follow a blogger, let’s say on Twitter, then you will get notifications every time that person tweets or retweets i.e. makes a new post. So, no extra effort is required.
• Most social channels allow you to boost your posts in the form of Ads or Ad posts to reach more people who never heard of you, thus generating new followers. (We will learn more about these in a later article.)

Now, even if you create great content and share them on social media, the most difficult part is to make people click on the post and visit your website.

In this article, you will learn effective actions to take to make a proper social media post for blog posts and other content.

So let’s get started.

1. Use A Specialized Social Media Post Image

The image is the first content that catches a person’s attention when browsing through social media. Without a proper image, a social media post becomes just a wasted effort.

Most people tend to use the basic featured image of the original website content as the social media post image. However, that is often not the best idea.

When you create a featured image for your content on your website, you create it to match your website’s outlook and theme.

However, to get attention on social media, you have to create an image that connects with the viewer.

Let us look at an example.

Here’s the featured image of one of our blogs, which is an article to learn about the advantages of using Kelko and a guide to the Kelkoo marketplace.

Now, if I share it on our Facebook page and choose to boost this post, then this post will not perform too well. This Image is not at all ideal to use for a social media post.

Here’s why.

Boosting a post on Facebook means your post will appear in the timelines of several people that look like an ordinary post.

However, people nowadays know that there are tons of advertisements that appear on their timelines. So people tend to avoid any posts that they do not find interesting or useful at first glance.

The Kelkoo image simply looks like an advertisement image which, people will assume, may cost money without benefit. So, people will not click on the shared post or, in most cases, even bother to read the captions and title.

Here’s an example of an image that does work.

This is the image we created for social sharing for one of our articles, a Guide To WooCommerce Product Feed.

Here are the reasons why this image helped to increase the number of engagements for this post:

• It clearly states what this post is about in a short sentence on the image.
• It has contrasting colors that help to grab attention.
• The illustrations on the right side give an idea about what niche it is related to.

You can use a small amount of text on the image to create a better connection with the audience.

Most importantly, the image does not look like an advertisement, rather, it looks like a helpful post for the relevant audience.

2. Choose A Caption That Connects With the Readers

When you create any blog post or content, it is obviously intended to help people with information or help them solve certain problems.

Your caption should reflect your intentions and possible benefits for viewers. So, here’s what you should do. 

Use the caption to inform people of

• The value they will get from your content.
• What the content is about.

It’s best if you can keep the caption within 3 sentences.

People usually screen through a timeline post for around 2-5 seconds. So a short caption is the best way to grab more attention.

If you are not an expert at writing an intentional caption in a short sentence, then you may consider using an AI sentence generator. Just provide the AI sentence generator with a topic, and it will provide you with a unique and compelling sentence caption.

Long captions often discourage viewers. People would rather scroll down the timeline, than stop at a post that has a long caption.

Here’re a couple of examples:

Example 1

Example 2

The captions in these posts-

• Is within three sentences.
• States the benefits of the main topic.
• States what the viewers will be reading about.

It is important that you talk directly with the viewers through the caption.

You may make your captions read more naturally by converting them from sound to text.

Here’s an example of a bad caption:

“WooCommerce is a great tool to create an eCommerce website. It has several features to set up the shop such as cart options, organized products, proper shipping information, and many more. Here is an article that can help to learn more about WooCommerce.”

This caption is not at all good because:

• It is not directly communicating with the reader.
• More informative, hence boring for social engagements.
• It is more like a paragraph rather than 3 short sentences.

So it will perform less than average on social media.

3. Use Hashtags Wisely

If you look at the above examples, there are a number of hashtags mentioned below the caption text.

Hashtags allow you to indicate which relevant topics this post falls under.

People searching for any terms, related to the hashtags, will find your post in the search results.

Plus, it also acts as a category that people can click to find more posts (by others) shared under the same hashtag.

For example, if you wrote a blog post on online marketing tactics, you may use the hashtag ‘#onlinemarketing’ when sharing on social media. You can check the frequency of a hashtag on social media using hashtag analytics tools.

• This hashtag has a good search volume.
• People will search for the term ‘online marketing’ on social sites which is relevant to this hashtag.
• Anyone clicking on this hashtag will find your post in the search results.

Many don’t know why hashtags are used and often use wrong, valueless hashtags.

For example, in the case of the blog post about a virtual tour guide, if I wanted, I could add a hashtag called “#virtualtourmayhem” when sharing it on social media.

But why would I?

This would not add any value to the post because,

• Sure enough, nobody will search for “virtual tour mayhem” or “#virtualtourmayhem”.
• Also, since this term was never used as a hashtag before, there is no chance that someone will click on it to find the post.

Only use hashtags that are actually used by others and are relevant to the search terms of your ideal target audience. Moreover, hashtags must be used precisely by businesses that choose to do marketing on social media. For example, if you sell jewelry, your hashtag should be #weddingring or #engagementring. But if you sell sports equipment, your hashtag should be #sportswear or #fitnessroutine

**One trick is to search for the hashtag term on the search bar of the desired social channel. The number of results with the same hashtag will indicate how much this tag was used.

If it’s used more often, it’s better to use it on your social media post as well. (Some sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn give suggestions on popular hashtags when you start typing the hashtag keyword.)

For example, if I search for #vr on Twitter, I will get results that include people that have #vr on their profile description, and a list of tweets that have a caption that includes #vr. This is an indication that the hashtag #vr is a good one to use on a social media post.

4. Use Custom Title & Description For More Social Engagements

Naturally, when you share blog content on social media, it uses the title and meta description of the original content on your site, as the social media post title and description.

However, it is better to set a different Title or Description on social media for more engagements.

Setting A Suitable Title

If you have a lengthy blog title, then you may use a shorter title for social media.

Let us look at an example:

We have an article with a Title –

Best Marketplaces To Sell Clothes Online In The USA That You Did Not Know [2020]

Now, though this title is fine for our website, it is very long, and most social channels won’t be able to display the full name, resulting in a view like this:

“Best Marketplaces To Sell Clothes Online In Th….”

**In the case of Facebook, the title will take two lines, and exclude the description which is also very important.

This reduces viewer impressions.

So for sharing on social media, I would rather use the Title:

Best Marketplaces To Sell Clothes Online In the USA [2020]

This will be visible on any social media channels in full and won’t take too long for viewers to read.

Sometimes, it’s wise to use a completely different Title for sharing on social media than the title of the original content on your site.

For example, let us say you wrote an informative blog with the title:

“Psychology on Blogging For Marketing [2020]”

This Title will do pretty well on SERPs but not on social media.

So in this case, you can use a different name on social media such as:

“How To Understand Reader’s Mind – Marketing Blog Guide”

You might say this heading will also work on SERPs, so why not use this as the main Blog title? Well, that’s because the original content title really depends on the keywords you wish to rank for on SERPs.

In the case of a Title on social media, the title has an extra purpose of creating an instant engagement. |People searching on SERPs will look into the top-ranking results that appear when relevant keywords are searched.

In the case of social media, the Tile has multiple purposes:

• We will be more focused on engaging with prospects on their timelines or news feed.
  
  Anyone following your social page will find your blog’s social media posts while scrolling through their timelines or news feed. Depending on its image, title and description, he/she will decide whether to click on it or not. An interesting title will definitely help.
  
• If possible, we will optimize it for social search results, but it is not mandatory.
  
  Most social media search engines provide post results that have the keywords in the caption or the hashtags. The title is the third priority. So it is not mandatory, but you may try to optimize it for social search results.

There are a few Instagram plugins for WordPress that can help you with that.

Social Media Post Description

The description is also an important thing to look at.

The meta description we set for any post is optimized for SERPs. However, the description section for a social media post is usually very small and, similar to the title, is used to create instant engagement.

Hence, you may use a shorter, engaging description when making a social media post for an article.

This can be easily done using the right tools.

On WordPress, if you use an SEO plugin such as Yoast or Rank Math, you will be able to assign a separate image, title, and description for Facebook and Twitter, for any particular blog post, from the post edit page.

For example, on Rank Math, you can edit a post’s social snippet.

However, this is limited to Facebook and Twitter only. For all other social sites, it’s best to use a tool that allows Open Graph Post customization, i.e., you can edit the title, description, and image of a post for social posting on any social channel.

**It is best to automate the whole process of social media marketing. We will learn more about social automation in a later article.

Final Thoughts

All the tactics mentioned in this article are proven and effective for maximum results.

It’s high time you start optimizing social media posts for any content you create on your blog site, and take advantage of the immense audience you can get through social media. Hence streamlining customer communication or communication with the audience is extremely important. 

These are all simple tactics, but they matter a lot more than you think.

With time, you will get used to these, and combined with all other strategies that we will cover, you will be able to see positive results with social media marketing in no time.

In the next article, we will discuss one of the latest tactics to follow, social automation.

After reading the next article, you will learn

• Why use social media automation?
• Actionable tactics to automate social sharing
• Guide to a reliable social automation tool for WordPress

Read the next article now:

• How To Use Social Media Automation For Successful Blogging