Defining Your Social Media Strategy
Episode #8 of the course How to create a profitable blog by Jessica Festa
Today in Day 8, we’ll dive deeper into social media, crafting an actual strategy for your accounts.
A smart approach is looking at the different types of content one can share—links, images, quotes, re-shares, and plain text—and choosing a staple type of content for each social media channel. For every four times you share your staple content type, share another afterward to keep things interesting.
What’s helpful is using a spreadsheet for each account, and writing out what an ideal social media week would look like for each channel.
For example, a week on Facebook for a vegan-on-a-budget blogger writing about eating vegan on a budget might look like:
• Monday: Share latest blog post with insight into why it was published and why it’s worth reading. Start with a question.
• Tuesday: Create a short video highlighting a healthy vegan ingredient and showcasing how to utilize its nutritious benefits in a recipe.
• Wednesday: Share a recent blog post by another blogger and tag them. Look for blog posts on timely trending topics.
• Thursday: Share an inspirational healthy living quote graphic made on Canva.
• Friday: Pose a question to the community, sharing a personal anecdote as the response.
• Saturday: Share an older blog post that’s still timely and give fans a teaser into what they’ll get out of it.
• Sunday: Break down a myth about eating vegan in a Facebook Live.
Remember to include an image or video with each.
Tip: The good news is, you can pre-schedule shares right in Facebook, so you don’t need to sit by your computer every day.
Social Media Tools
• Hootsuite: This is a tool for pre-scheduling social media shares so you don’t have to do it in real time. Similar programs include Tweetdeck, Buffer, and a more robust paid option called SmarterQueue.
• Bitly: A great and FREE resource for tracking the engagement of certain links that you share. Once you make an account, you’ll be able to paste links into their tool to create “Bitlinks” (shorter, trackable links that you can even customize). From there, you can click “view stats” for any of your Bitlinks to get real-time information about how many people are clicking them.
• Interact: This tool allows you to create niche-relevant quizzes. When readers take a quiz, they’ll be prompted to sign up for your email list AND share their results on social media, allowing for additional blog exposure for you. Additionally, you can sprinkle relevant links into quiz results.
• Tailwind Automates re-pinning to save you time. This tool is great to ensure that one pin that only got 10 clicks last month gets re-seen this month as Tailwind re-pins it back to the top. They offer a free trial, and the tool starts at just $10/month after.
• SumoMe: A robust plugin for WordPress.org with tons of features (some free, some paid) to encourage social media sharing of your blog posts. Social media sharing buttons, easy image sharing, and a click-to-Tweet highlighter are just a few of many.
Your Turn: Use this worksheet to craft your own social media strategy. Try your initial strategy for 90 days and then revamp where needed.
Get excited! Tomorrow, we’ll be covering how to turn your audience into a community.
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