Do you spend too much time marketing and sharing your blog posts on social media, still with negligible results?
Are you looking for a social media strategy that will bring you more targeted traffic and even save your time?
A lot of us spent nearly 2 hours daily (considering 30 minutes on each social platform, if you focus on 4 social media networks), in want of likes, shares, retweets and traffic back to our sites. This is nearly equal to 60 hours per week.
Isn’t that huge time waste?
And, most of the time you get unrelated traffic to your site thereby increase bounce rates and lowering sales and ad CPC.
If you want to drive targeted traffic and still save time in social media marketing, I have come up with a social media plan that saves you at least 50 hours a month that is equal to 8 working days (approx.).
Ready to save time?
Let’s start!
Quick Navigation
1. Find Where Your Target Audience Hangs Out:
While many will argue about why you have to breakdown audience when we can share with everyone, I will say separating your target audience from the unwanted crowd is a smart move.
It's not about serving everyone or getting in front of everyone, it's about getting in front of the right ones, who can give us traffic, sales, and leads, isn’t it?
The next step will show you how to do this effectively.
2. Get The Right Content, in Front of the Right Audience - A Neil Patel Strategy:
If you want to get more engagement from your social media platforms, you have to share the right content to the right audience.
You cannot dump everything into one place and ask your audience to respond.
Take a look at what Neil Patel has to say:
The right way to get more shares and more traffic is to create content that is ideal for the platform you are sharing.
This way you not only save time but also use your time effectively.
But, How do I find which social network is the best fit for my blog?
If it is difficult to find the best social networking site for your blog promotion, here is a research from Pew Internet, which shows the current demographics of major social media platforms.
Now, you can easily get a clue about where your target audience hangs out.
This way you will make sure that everything you do on social media is heard by the right people.
The above research is useful only when you already know where your target audience is.
In case you don’t know your readers’ profile, follow these steps to find it easily.
Step 1. Go to Adwords display planner.
Adwords Display Planner
Step 2. Type in your important keywords or the general topics you are blogging about. I entered luxury handbags as an example.
Adwords display planner keyword study
Step 3. Now you can get a result that shows the demographics of the audience that is related to that keyword.
Audience Demographics
So, in this task (that took no more than 30 seconds), I found out the complete profile of my audience.
Now I can go to the research page mentioned above and easily select the social media site that best fits me. Sweet!
PRO TIP: Do not focus on more than 2-3 social media networks at a time. Instead, select the best 2-3 platforms where your audience is active and focus on giving time and value to them.
3. What To Share on Which Social Media Platform?
Just like one size doesn’t fit all, one type of content is also not relevant for different social media platforms.
Since each social media platform has its own set of audience, their choice and interests vary deeply too.
Imagine, you would post big, feminine Pinterest type posters on LinkedIn?
This would literally scare and piss off your audience, right?
So, I advice creating different plans for different social media platforms.
If you are still confused, here is a brief illustration from Coschedule, which shows what you should post on each social media platform.
What content works on social networks
Now that you know what to share and where to share, you can easily craft effective social media updates and either post them or schedule them for later (I’ll talk about it later in the post).
Follow these simple steps to create an effective content strategy for social media sharing:
How To Find Content To Share?
If you are worried and are not knowing what content to share on social media, here are some easy steps to find what works and how to use them in your sharing.
Social Crawlytics: Social Crawlytics is a free tool that analyzes any given URL and finds it’s social share count.
You can enter your own blog URL and then it will scan your content to give you the total shares your site has garnered over the years.
You also get the option to get the social share insights of your blog posts, top authors of your blog (in terms of social shares) and even sub-domain tracking.
How to use social crawlytics to find content ideas?
If you can use the above tool to find out social shares of your blog, you can also use it to find and track the most popular content of your competitors 
Now go ahead and find the popular content of your competitors.
Track their popular authors and see what they share on social media.
Alternatively, you can use buzzsumo to find the best content shared on the web.
Buzzsumo allows you to search for content based on topics so you can easily find popular content on the web based on your keywords.
Simply go to Buzzsumo, type in your keyphrase or topic you are blogging about.
Here, again, for example, I will use “luxury handbags” as a generalized search.
Next, you can open each article to read and then share them to social networks of your choice.
You can customize the article type, date range and even similar content from the same domain using the column on the left-hand side.
The paid version gives you more features including export option but the free version is enough to get started.
PRO TIP: How to save time sharing content? If you have buffer extension installed on your browser. You can select a block of text and right click to share it or schedule it using buffer. Same goes with images, which show a share button when hovered over. Hat tip to my friends over at RazorSocial for this tip.
Is There Any Rule For Social Media Sharing Ratio?
In social media, there are some golden rules as to what content should be shared by what ratio.
Before we proceed let me tell you, these rules don't compel others to follow them.
However, research has shown that following them yields good results.
While there are many rules out there that teach you what to share, I love the one that was proposed by TC McCann from Gist.com.
According to him, whenever you post 10 updates to social media, they should be divided in the 5:3:2 ratio based on your content, other people’s content and your personal updates.
Which means,
5 status update (out of the 10) should be curated content about others in your industries:
This can be used to share content that is relevant and shows your authority.
Sharing other people’s content can also help you to build meaningful relationships with them.
3 Status updates about posts from your blog, your product promotion, etc.
This has to be your promotion.
What you want to promote in social media.
Any of your blog posts or case studies can be a perfect fit.
2 Status updates regarding personal front:
This is to add variety and personality to your business.
Do not ignore this aspect as it is necessary to build your brand over time.
If you are shy of posting your pictures, share behind the scenes of your work model.
You can share your quick wins and personal motivating stories or quotes.
4. How To Save Time By Uploading Content That Already Got Huge Engagement?
Now that you have created your awesome social media content strategy, it would make no sense to use it once and then go through the whole process again to share content.
How about a quick tip in which you can recycle your social media updates to use over and over again?
NOTE: This step is a very good time saver and would help you to automate social media tasks. But, I do not recommend too much repeating on sites like facebook or Google Plus. Use this strategy for Twitter scheduling.
More details about this step? Read on 
With this trick, you will reupload all your tweets in a given time range to a social media scheduling tool of your choice (I use buffer).
Then it will get reposted again without you having to do anything.
Since Twitter is crowded and people miss the tweets uploaded the previous day, tweeting something you tweeted 3 months ago makes sense.
Here is a video tutorial about how to use Buffer to perform this task.
5. How To Use Users To Get Automated Shares?
There goes this small but true quote “Teamwork makes the dream work”.
And this is even more relevant as far as social media marketing is considered.
If you could get some helping hands to share your content to their audience's then how beneficial would it be?
No, I am not talking about influencer outreach.
That is a whole different vertical.
What I am talking about is mutual sharing.
It means you share other people’s content (of your choice) and they in return share your blog articles.
Sites like Viral Content Buzz, CoPromote, and JustRetweet, are common examples of this method.
What Are The Benefits of Mutual Sharing:
- You get ready-made content to share to your audience. (select the ones that are relevant to your niche)
- When other people share your content, you tap into their follower zone thus getting additional readers, more followers, etc.
- Others share your content, and you save time.
- Sometimes, your content gets shared by influencers in your niche thus skyrocketing authority and page views.
- Helps build relationships with other fellow bloggers.
How To Use Viral Content Buzz:
For using Viral Content Buzz,
- You have to go to the site and login using any of your social media accounts (twitter, preferably).
- Then all you have to do is select the basic niche or categories in which you want to see blog posts to share.
- Now share the relevant blog posts to your social media channels (like facebook, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, and Twitter).
- You earn credits for each sharing based on the number of followers you have. The point system is based on the follower count. Given below:
Other sites like CoPromote and JustRetweet also work along the same lines where you earn credit by sharing and then invest them to get other people share your content.
PRO TIP: Don’t share all the posts of others at one time or do not log in to above sites every now and then to share and earn points. Instead, login for 20-30 minutes and schedule as many updates as you can to your buffer account and then enjoy the free time.
6. Use Automation to Some Degrees:
No matter how much you do to save time, it will always be less in front of automation strategy.
Automating blog posts to get shared wherever they are published is a great time saver.
This will also alert your followers on each social media platform that there is a new post on the blog.
You can also get your posts indexed faster because social networks like Twitter are always crawled by search engines (read Google).
Here are some tools to automate your social media sharing:
1. OnlyWire:
Onlywire is an awesome tool for bookmarking your posts to nearly 30 sites simultaneously without even a single click.
All you need to do it get an account on the platform and add your blog RSS to your profile.
Onlywire is probably the best free alternative to automated social posting.
It is available as web form, a share button for your website and also as a browser extension and WordPress plugin.
It posts up to thirty networks for free, and up to 50 networks, and three RSS feeds (that means three blogs) in paid mode.
For 90% of us, free mode is enough.
2. JetPack Publicize:
Jetpack is a special plugin especially for WordPress bloggers that are yet to explore the rich functionalities of WordPress.org.
Jetpack is like a backpack that has almost everything you need.
The publicize feature of Jetpack allows you to automatically share your WordPress posts to various social media channels too.
Although it may seem lucrative but as they say all things that come free come with a hidden price.
People using the jetpack plugin complain that they have been cheated by jetpack that uses your brand power to promote WordPress.com, which is its parent company.
Yes, when you post an update via jetpack the status appears as “Jack posted on WordPress” instead of “jack posted on Jackssite.com”, the link also shows no sign that it is from your blog.
So if you are okay compromising your brand with free stuff you can opt for Jetpack.
3. Hootsuite and Buffer:
Both these uber-popular social media sharing tools provide automation to some extent.
You can add your blog feed URLs (and those of friends) using both the tools.
So next time you (or your friends) publish a blog post, that gets shared automatically to your registered social media channels.
To add feed URL to buffer, go to your buffer account dashboard, go to content tab and find the feed sub tab and then enter your feed URL
For Hootsuite, follow this DIY Guide.
Over to you,
So, with this social media marketing strategy, you can save nearly 60-70% of your time spent in social media marketing for your blog.
With some automation and some smart strategies, you can now save time and use that in expanding your blog, researching about new posts, learning affiliate marketing or competitor research.
I have saved nearly half of the time I spent online, using the above steps.
So I know you can too.
If you have any tips for sharing social media content effectively, feel free to drop it in the comment section.
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