Pushing Blogs to Social Media
A blog is great for business: it can increase your authority and visibility, increase conversions, allow you to rank for more keywords, and keep people coming back to your website.
You can extend the value of your blog by reposting it on your social media sites, such as Facebook, tweeting it on Twitter or LinkedIn, or including it on a site like Merchant’s Circle or Brownbook. It’s usually a simple matter to add a link to your blog post or page.
First, let’s talk about how to do this. Here are step-by-step instructions for Facebook:
- Go to your Facebook page.
- Click “Edit Page” in the right-hand corner.
- Click “apps” in the navigation bar on the left.
- Find “Notes” and click on “go to app.”
- Again in the lefthand sidebar, click on “edit import settings.”
- Put the URL of your blog into the search box, agree that the blog belongs to you, and click “import.”
- You will be asked to confirm that the right blog has been imported, and then you’re through.
(See a video of the process if you need more help.)
On a MerchantCircle page, you’ll click on News and add your feed by typing your feed address into a text box. For Twitter, a tool like Twitterfeed is the easiest way to automate the push. In every case, it’s basically a matter of finding the page where you can type in the address.
Before you do it, though, you should consider the pros and cons.
Reasons to push your blog automatically to social media:
- More people will see your content, and it will jazz up your pages.
- It’s a time saver compared with manually adding a link each day, especially if you add it to multiple pages.
- You’ll be assured of having regular tweets or status updates, even when you’re too busy to be social.
Reasons not to go the automatic route:
- You may not have control over the pictures used, which you usually do with manual links.
- A link with a summary might encourage visitors to head over to your website, where pushing the feed may keep them reading only at the site you’ve pushed it to.
- You might weaken your page at some sites by posting duplicate content.
Weigh the pros and cons and decide whether or not to automate. Either way, be sure to spread the word about your news.