In this post you’ll learn how to promote your blog posts on social media. By the end of this, you’ll have an easy and streamlined process that will allow you to bring more visitors to your blog and publish better content on your social media accounts (which hopefully doesn’t include images of cats)

Ready?

Why Promote Your Blog Posts on Social Media?

Your social media accounts are the most important channels when it comes to promoting your articles and blog posts. Too often, our social media marketing efforts are limited to posting about new content once, maybe twice. Often, there’s no process in place to help you and your team streamline the process.

"Having a good process for social media increases your efficiency and this will ultimately lead to success for your business.", says Olivia Tan, the Co-Founder at CocoFax.

And because processes count, we've created one for you:

Step 1: Creating Content For Your Social Posts

In this first part you’ll learn how you can create engaging content for your social media posts based on your blog post. For this example, we’ll be using the following example post: 18 Awesome Slack Hacks For Marketing Teams

Ideally, you want to have 3 to 5 social posts for each channel based on your blog post. It’s not always super easy to get creative, so here are a few ideas to help you get started.

Tip #1: Use Your Post’s Headline

Your blog post’s headline is one of the most powerful assets for grabbing people’s attention. Don’t fall into the trap of simply copying & pasting. Instead, make a statement about the headline or encourage people to pay attention to the information in the headline.

Example: “Attention Slack users, we’re sharing our secrets. Find out how your marketing team can be more productive with these 18 hacks.”

Tip #2: Take a Quote From Your Post

Testimonials or quotes seem like something you can easily copy & paste, but don’t do that. Instead, you need to find out what people actually want to read and what would make them want to click on your post. Ask yourself, “if I was in my readers’ shoes, would I want to find out more about this?”

Example: “Modern B2B marketing teams don’t work in silos, they need integrations. And that’s where Slack’s powerful apps come in.”

Tip #3: Ask Questions Based on Post Content

What type of question would a reader looking for answers have here? Think of an interesting piece of information in your blog post and create a question around it - the sort of question your audience would have if you just presented the information to them.

Example: “How can marketing teams triple their productivity in Slack?”

Tip #4: Highlight Interesting Stats or Facts

People love facts & stats. Take some of the interesting ones from your blog content and turn them into a standalone social media post, for example:

“Did you know, Slack offers 150 integrations that users can install?”

Remember, there’s not a single-best solution to blog content. Be creative and use our tips above for inspiration.

Next, you need to plan your social posts.

Step 2: Planning Your Content

Now that you know how to create social post content, it’s time to fill out this worksheet. No matter what social media distribution tool you use, the worksheet will help you plan the content or get it approved.

1. Start naming the tab after your blog post. Fill in the blog post title and URL, then write the names of the channels you’re going to use. In our case, it will be Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

2. Fill in the post copy. These are the ideas you’ve come across in the previous step. For Twitter, make sure these posts are under 280 characters. You can use this handy tool to check how many characters your posts have.

3. When you finish completing the copy it should look similar to the image below. You will learn how to design the images in the next task.

Step 3: Designing graphics for your social posts

Not everyone has the luxury of having an in-house design team or working with a design subscription service. You can easily create high-quality images in tools like Canva or Stencil. Both tools offer a free plan which is restricted in the number of designs you can create.

For this example, we’ll be using Stencil. To access Stencil, you need to create a free account first (the free one limits you to 10 images per month), or you can get a paid account.

If you’re new to Stencil, the service offers cool templates to get you going:

1. Find the Templates area (left-side in between Icons & Graphics and Quotes). This is where you can find various sizes and templates for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest & Co.

You can then find a variety of templates based on categories. Check this out:

In addition to templates, you can also use or try out the other sections of Stencil:

• Photos - In here you can find royalty - free photos to choose from, depending on what you type in the search box above.
• Icons - You can also add icons to your image. Type in a keyword and add icons to your image
• Quotes - Here is where you can find smart things said by famous people.

2. Customise a template with your colours, fonts and styles

Another way to create social media designs for your blog post is to manually create them from scratch.

Adding images:

1. Look at your first social media channel in the worksheet, in our case Facebook
2. Select the Facebook size for your blank canvas, e.g. “Facebook Link Post”
3. Upload an image from your blog posts or search for a good one in the Stencil search box. (Alternatively, you can use free image search tools like Unsplash & Co.)
4. Click on the image to add it to your canvas.
5. Click on it again and you can add colour filters or visual effects to your image

Adding quotes & getting the share link:

1. Click on “quotes” to add a quote to your image.
2. Click on the text to open the settings box and decide how your quote should look
3. When done, save your image and then download it. (Pro Tip: You can also share it directly from the app if you are connected with your Facebook account).
4. Get the shareable link of the visual (see below), then past it to your worksheet in the “post image” column, next to its copy.

Last, repeat the steps for all other posts in your worksheet. Add the links to your worksheet:

Pro Tip: If you have a design subscription with Design Buffs, you can simply share the worksheet with us on your Trello board and your designer will create custom visuals for you. Simples.

Next up!

Step 4: Verify that your blog post looks good on social

Simply head over to Social Share Preview, a free tool to see how your blog posts preview looks like when someone shares on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & Pinterest.

Enter the URL of your blog post and hit the turquoise arrow to debug the results
(see image below)

Three things you want to avoid:

• Image being cut off or unrecognisable
• Text being cut off
• No image present in the first place

And that, ladies and gents, is why it makes sense to create custom visuals in the first place 😉

Onwards.

Depending on the the CMS (=Content Management System) you use, you will now need to update the social share thumbnails with the the newly designed visuals from step 2 of the process. If you’re using WordPress, you’ll most likely have SEO tools installed like SEOPress or Yoast SEO.

Pro Tip: If you’re using WordPress and don’t have any SEO tools installed make sure you do. Both, SEOPress & Yoast SEO, offer a freemium version and are incredibly easy to set up (even for a non-technical user)

If you do, under each post you’ll find a section to update the thumbnails for each social channel. In our case, we’re using SEOPress so the screen looks similar to the one below:

Fill in the Facebook Title (duh), the description, and most importantly upload the social image that you added to your worksheet in step 2 of the process.

In most tools, you can also see a preview of the post and triple-check everything looks good. Do these for all the social channels that people can share your post on.

Now we have made sure that our readers can share our posts without the sharing preview looking “ugly” it’s time for the actual promotion & distribution part.

Exciting...

Step 5: Promote Your Blog Posts On Social Media

For distributing your posts, you have an array of tools at your disposal (free or paid). Buffer, the king of social media, created an entire library of social media management tools, which you may want to check out.

In our case, we’re going to use Buffer and MissingLettr, so make sure you have created your free or paid account on these websites.

Use Buffer to distribute and schedule your posts

Setting everything up

1. After you have created your Buffer account, link it to your social media accounts (The free plan allows you to schedule up to 10 posts on 3 social channels for 1 user)
2. Make sure you connect to the pages you are managing and not your personal profile
3. Once you have connected your accounts, you can start posting and scheduling your social posts. Click on the dashboard, then go to your worksheet, copy your post and paste it into the app.
4. Go back to your worksheet, download the visual from the link and upload it to Buffer
5. Don’t forget to paste the link to your actual blog post as well
6. The social icons above your post show where it will be distributed. Click on the icon to prevent the post from being distributed on that channel. For example, we don’t want to distribute our Facebook image on Twitter since the visual only works for Facebook

Distributing your posts
You have various options to distribute your posts:

• Add it to queue (in case you want to revise it later or show it to your manager for approval)
• Share it now (pretty self-explanatory)
• Share it next (which basically means it will be shared right after your next post)
• Schedule it (also pretty self-explanatory)

Pro Tip: Use Buffer to schedule all of your posts. We recommend scheduling one post per channel, every two days.

Promote Your Blog Posts on Social Media All Year Long

Again, there are plenty of tools out there that help you with the distribution of Evergreen blog posts. One of them being MissingLettr which we’ll use in our case. Another popular platform is MeetEdgar.

Want to know what MissingLettr is? Here’s a short video from the founder & CEO

Setting everything up
1. After you have created your MissingLettr account, connect your blog simply by entering the URL. If you have an RSS feed, this is the simplest way of sharing.
(If you don’t know how to find the RSS URL, check out this guide here.)

2. Next, you need to link your social profiles to MissingLettr and set up basic branding. This is important, because MissingLettr will automatically pull quotes from your article and create quote bubbles like the ones below. But don’t worry, you can always tweak the quotes and each individual post that goes out later in the process.

Creating a campaign
After you set up your branding, you can now start scheduling campaigns with MissingLettr.

What’s a campaign?

“A campaign is a sequence of 9 social media posts that MissingLettr creates for you based on your post’s content. These posts contain both text and images.

The text is pulled out of your blog, and you can also include hashtags. The images are extracted from your blog, but you can also have the option to create custom quote images or replace images with custom ones you have designed.

The 9 posts are scheduled to be sent out to your social media accounts over the course of a year. You can determine the duration & frequency of each sequence within the tool”

1. Select the campaign from the backlog column. You can then mouse over the chevron and select “Create Drip Campaign”. You also have the option to delete any campaigns you don’t want to drip out to your social channels.

2. Under the “Drafts” column you will see all campaigns that are ready for you to “Review”, e.g. these posts are ready to be edited.

3. You can now edit the content and the media you’d like to use in the campaign. You can select hashtags, images & quotes. Additionally, you can also add additional quotes, select the frequency (e.g. 12 months evergreen) and the channels you want to post it to.
Pro Tip: Take the recommendations from MissingLettr but also add your custom images to the campaign alongside the quotes you’ve created in your Distribution Worksheet.

4. Click on Build Campaign. You can see that you still have full control over the content, the images, the copy and the media.

5. Once you have triple-checked that everything looks okay, you can click on “Launch Campaign”

Pro Tip: Use MissingLettr’s calendar feature allows you to simply drag & drop scheduled posts to any day. It also allows you to gain a bird’s eye view on your campaign so you always know what’s going on.

And that’s it. Your campaign will be sent out to your social channels on “Autopilot”.

Wrapping Up

You now have an easy and streamlined process for creating social posts from your blog post and distributing it across your channels. If you have any feedback or thoughts, tweet at @DesignBuffs. Any shares would be awesome.