You simply cannot afford to ignore social media any more when you set up your blog. Or at least, you may be missing out on visitors, traffic and sales if you do.
Social networks may seem confusing if you have not yet tried them out for yourself, but there are a number of things that you can do to get started and take advantage of all that they have to offer.
Set up your own accounts
The first thing to do if you want to get involved with social media is to set up your accounts. There are a plethora of sites to choose from, but a good place to start is with the biggest: Twitter and Facebook.
These are both very different sites and your strategy will be different for both of them, so it is worth spending some time getting used to how they work, finding out where your customers are, and working out what they find interesting.
A good technique is to follow some of your competitors and see what they are talking about and which of their activities seem to generate the most interest.
Then you can use all of this information to start to form your own plan for the type of information you will publish to your networks.
One way to integrate your blog and your social networks is to post brief descriptions in Facebook and Twitter of your latest post, with a link to read it, and this can help to direct more traffic to your site.
Plugins
If you are writing a blog then it is a very good idea to make use of social media plugins. These are simple buttons that you can add to the end of your blog which will make it a lot easier for your customers to share your content across their own social media networks.
The idea here is that you can use your site visitors to share your content with their own networks so that it reaches more people who may be interested in your content.
By writing really good quality content and making it easy for your visitors to share, you can help to improve the chances that your content will reach more potential readers.
Link to your accounts in all correspondence
You may want to use every opportunity to inform customers, clients and others about your social networks.
To do this, include a link to your Twitter and Facebook pages in your email signature, on your business card, in letters and wherever you can.
Always use correspondence as an opportunity to get more people to find your social networks so that they can get access to your content and help to spread it further.
Make sure you have a social strategy
Social media may end up playing a very large role in your overall strategy, or it may just have a small part to play. But it is a very good idea to try it out and see what you can make of it because it really could help you to get more people to your site and help you to build your brand more effectively.
Remember, we are social media veterans, and can help you run and manage your social media campaign.
About Jason Hulott
