Marketing your blog is a big part of being a blogger. One that you can’t ignore if you want to reach more people and help them with your knowledge and expertise. We’ve already covered the five essential steps to growing your audience here. As a reminder, being active on social media is one of them.
It’s a great way to distribute your content, engage with your audience, and drive traffic back to your blog. There are plenty of tools available to help you do that. We’ll cover 12 amazing tools for social media sharing and scheduling, research as well as reporting and analytics.
Social Media Sharing & Scheduling Tools
With so many social media networks at your disposal, bloggers can easily burn out, trying to be everywhere at once. A sharing and scheduling tool can make your life easier and save you tons of time. Here are a few of the more popular options:
With Hootsuite, you can schedule your social media posts ahead of time and manage them in one convenient calendar. If people reply to your posts – no matter on which channel – the messages go into one inbox, making it easy for you to respond. You can try Hootsuite for free for 30 days. Then join a paid plan from $19/month or continue with the free version that allows you to manage up to three social media accounts.
Like Hootsuite, SproutSocial offers an easy way to plan, organize, and schedule your social media posts across the most widely used networks. In addition, it provides a way to listen to your audience and analyze their sentiment to optimize your social media strategy. SproutSocial also offers a 30-day free trial, but not a free plan. The standard plan starts at $99/month per user.
Buffer makes social media management simple by focusing on two areas: publishing and analyzing. You can gain in-depth insights into the performance of your posts in one dashboard. It will provide you with recommendations for the best time and frequency to post. Buffer offers a 14-day free trial and a free account to manage up to three social media profiles. Their pro plan starts at $15/month.
If you’re growing your blog audience on Pinterest and Instagram, then Tailwind might just be the right tool for you. You can quickly schedule your photos, videos, and pins for the next few weeks. The integrated analytics will show you what’s working and what isn’t to help you pin and post at the best times. A unique feature of Tailwind is Tribes. Join other bloggers in your niche and share each other’s content.
While you can share your newest blog posts on social media, your readers should be empowered to do the same. That’s why every blog post needs social media sharing buttons. We recommend limiting the buttons to the most important networks that your audience uses (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest). Generally, these buttons are available by default in your WordPress theme or blogging tool of choice. You can also use the WordPress Plugin WP Socializer to add them to your posts.
Another way to encourage your audience to share your content is the Click to Tweet feature. It’s a quick way for your readers to share a key takeaway from your blog with their Twitter audience. Simply write the message that you want people to share, and the tool generates a link. Then add this link to a simple “click to tweet” call-to-action. Clicking the link will prepopulate a tweet that your audience can fire off.
Research Tools
A solid social media strategy for bloggers also involves being deliberate about what you write about, where you share it, and with whom you partner with. These research tools will help you discover what’s working for your audience.
Using a few popular hashtags that match the topic of your blog article and social post can help the likelihood that your audience will see your social media post. Ritetag.com allows you to discover popular and trending hashtags in your space. You can also search for a particular hashtag to see exposure, retweets, last 24 hr stats and whether it’s been banned. The paid version includes even more stats to help you pick the perfect hashtags.
Buzzsumo is the go-to tool to explore what content is already performing well in a given niche. With a few clicks, you can find out what people are searching for, view trends, and uncover new ideas for your blog. You’ll also get to know the leading voices in your space. That’s a start to securing potential guest posting and collaboration opportunities.
If you’re wondering what to write about next, tap into the Q&A site for fresh inspiration. You can find common questions that your audience is asking and then create a blog post with the answer. Quora is also a powerful networking tool when you’re an active user and answer questions yourself.
SparkToro is an audience intelligence tool that helps you discover what (and who) your audience reads, listens to, watches, follows, shares, and talks about online. This allows you to find the right topics to cover and the right people to partner with. You’ll also know how to get in front of your audience.
Reporting & Analytics Tools
You’re firing off tweets and posts, but how effective are they at reaching and engaging your audience? These reporting and analytics tools will help you find the answer.
When you’re using a service like Hootsuite, Sproutsocial, or Buffer, your analytics needs will likely be covered. However, if you’re looking to customize what metrics you report on, another option is to build your own dashboard. Tools like Databox make it easy to track the performance of your social media efforts across channels and your improvements over time on one single dashboard. They even have pre-built templates to help you get started.
Followerwonk specializes in the analysis of your Twitter followers, providing you with detailed breakdowns of your network and their activity. You can find out when they’re most active and which words appear in their bios most often. The tool also segments your followers by location, gender, and social authority.
Socialbakers offers a vast collection of analytics tools. For example, you can compare the performance of your Facebook page or Instagram profile to that of other businesses and bloggers. And you can find out which content is performing the best on Facebook across keywords and industries. This should leave you with some great inspiration for your own content and make the search for influencers in your space to approach and partner with easier.
Make the most out of the content you produce
You’ve spent hours crafting a thoughtful blog post. It would be a shame if it doesn’t reach the people who most need to hear your message. Social media is an effective way to share your content, and the tools above can help you do that effectively. Most of them are even free to get started. When you cut the time you spend on research and distribution, you can be even more productive at writing.
