Most blog post have a very short life span. Even if you are sending them to your email subscribers, the most traffic that a blog post receives is in the first 24 hours of being published. How can you utilise social media to maximise the long term impact of your posts?
What is social distribution?
It is the process whereby your blog post can live a long and happy life. This process not only notifies your social connections as soon as you publish a blog post but also ensures that the post continues to cycle through your social feeds over the course of days, weeks and for months afterwards.
1. Splinter
Splintering your content is the process of breaking off bits and pieces of it and posting those pieces from time to time. You can splinter headlines, quotes, images, questions and statistics found from your research and distribute this across your social media platforms.
2. Visualize
Visual content is necessary to drive engagement and clicks on social media. You can use the featured image in your blog post and share this on social media but it is much more effective to create new images for each piece of splinter content.
3. Broadcast
After creating your splinter content and visuals you need to broadcast your content on your social channels. The main focus of broadcasting this copy is to highlight the benefits and the points of the article. Make sure you are aware of the lifespan of content on the social channels for example Twitter has a shorter life span than other channels. With Twitter, create up to three tweets that can out in a matter of hours after each one.
4. Tag
When broadcasting a post, tag people or brands whenever it makes sense. By doing so you drive traffic to your post and draw attention from your social influencers and their followers. Also use hashtags where appropriate – especially on networks such as Instagram and Twitter. A hashtag is a simple way for people to search for tweets or Instagram posts with a common topic.
5. Monitor
As most of the social interaction occurs in the first 24-48 hours of a blog post’s life you need to monitor the performance of that blog post on the social web. Make sure you are using the analytics on your social channels and your website to monitor where the traffic is coming from, the number of views the post is getting and the time your post performed at its peak.
6. Schedule
A normal, undistributed piece of content usually creates a spike in click before it disappears. That is why long term automation distribution or scheduling is so important. Once you publish your post and have the splinter content generated, schedule this on rotation to keep the social traffic flowing to your blog posts.
The majority of people factor into account the best time at which to publish a blog post but in essence the timing does not matter as much as spreading the word and publicising the post. This needs to be done continuously and the content needs to be relevant today, tomorrow, next month and two years down the line to keep the lifespan moving.
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