Social Media Marketing for Business

You just spent hours writing a new blog post and hit the big “publish” button. Now what?

If all you do is publish your post, the only people likely to see it are those who subscribe to your blog or check it regularly – most likely a small portion of your potential audience. Follow the seven strategies below after publishing a blog post to ensure you don’t leave out the “marketing” from your content marketing.

1. Create optimized images
First things first: before sharing anywhere, create images that are sized optimally for each network where you plan to share. That means landscape layout for Facebook and Twitter, square for Instagram and portrait for Pinterest and Google+. A consistent image that looks great everywhere you share your post can take your content to the next level.

2. Share on social media
Now that you’ve got optimized images, share your post out via all of your active social media sites. This is a quick way to reach a wide audience. Be sure to tailor your copy to each individual
network as well as the audience that follows you on that network. Don’t just copy and paste in your post headline when you share.

3. Email your subscribers
Never overlook the power of your email list. Let your subscribers know that you’ve published new content and tell them in the email (briefly) why you think they’d find it valuable. Be sure to track your opens and click throughs to see what email practices work best in reaching your audience.

Pro Tip: Check out these top 19 email marketing tools if you haven’t found one you love yet.

4. Share with anyone you mentioned
Does your article mention any companies or individuals as examples? Make sure you let them know they were mentioned! Send them an email or Tweet to them with your article – you’ll
be pleasantly surprised what this outreach can do for relationship building as well as getting more shares of your post.

Pro Tip: Use a tool like ContentMarketer.io to streamline your outreach. Simply drop in your blog post URL and Content Marketer will pull in all those companies or individuals that you mentioned so you can email or Tweet to them directly – how cool is that?

5. Share with industry influencers
Research experts on your blog post’s topic and share your article with them as well, via email, Twitter or whatever method works best for you. Try something like “Hey Joe, I know you regularly share valuable content about social media. I thought you might find this article I wrote interesting. Feel free to share if you like it!”

6. Schedule future Tweets
Line up more than one Tweet with your blog post to keep it from getting lost in the clutter. Trickle the post out multiple times through the day that it’s published, and then once or twice a day for the next few days. You can even schedule it to go out again weeks after it’s published. Just be sure to mix up your Tweet copy.

Pro Tip: Use a tool like Buffer to schedule your future Tweets.

7. Link back in older posts
Take a look back through your older blog posts – bonus points for the blog posts that get the most traffic – and include links to your new post. Find keywords or phrases in that old post that relate to your new content and add in a hyperlink. Just be sure not to overdo it so your blog doesn’t appear spammy. This is a great way for readers to dive deeper into your content.

Want a PDF version of these 7 tactics? Download yours below!

Meet Christina Sullivan

Christina graduated from Virginia Tech in 2013 and is incredibly passionate about design, marketing and branding. Before working as Director of Brand Strategy at Heyo, Christina was Director of Marketing and Communications at a nonprofit regional technology organization.