In order to maximize the reach on each of your blog posts, you’ll probably want to work on several different strategies. The blog posts should be search engine optimized, for instance, if you want to get traffic from the major search engines. You might work on building up your mailing list, reminding your regular readers to check out your new content. And the immense power of social media certainly cannot be understated.
Most of us would agree that you want to share your blog posts through channels like Twitter, Facebook and Google+. You can even automate your social shares so you don’t have to go through the process of sharing those posts manually each time you publish something new. Part of the problem with typical automation and syndication like that, though, is that you are left with little control over when the posts are actually shared (aside from when you decide for the posts to go live).
There is decidedly a fine line between being a strategic user of social media, providing the valuable service to your followers of informing them you have new content for them to read, and being an annoying over-sharer who frustratingly floods their feeds with too many links. Does this leave any room for sharing the same post more than once?
The short answer is yes. In fact, it might be in your best interest to share your blog post multiple times simply because a typical Twitter feed, for example, can fly by far too quickly and your follower might miss your tweet altogether. In fact, there’s a good chance they’ll miss your tweet, especially if they follow a lot of people.
The time of day when you send out that tweet is critically important and there are several tools and articles on this subject. Hootsuite has a good blog post on the best time to tweet that you might want to check out. There are no hard and fast rules here, but the goal is to reach as many people as possible without being too annoying and overly self-promotional.
To justify multiple tweets to effectively the same content, try to add value to each individual tweet. If you look at John’s feed above, you’ll see that one link is to the YouTube video, while the other link is to the accompanying blog post. These are almost the same content, but not quite. Some people may want to just watch the video while others might want to read the post too. In either case, the tweets are unique, even though they’re practically the same content.
Here’s a good example from my own Twitter timeline. Every week, I put together a speedlink where I highlight five interesting blog posts I read in the preceding week. The first tweet came from the automation process I described above. The second tweet linking to the same post was written manually (and scheduled) by me, adding in the mentions for the bloggers who I included in the speedlink.
Do you notice the very important difference there? While the original tweet may have been seen and read by my followers, the second tweet definitely got noticed by the people I tagged. They likely missed it the first time around. By catching them the second time around, I attracted some retweets and favorites. That’s good stuff.
Another consideration you may want to ponder is whether you want to share the same blog post at the same time across different social media channels. This makes the most intuitive sense and it’s what most people do. However, there may be value in spreading it out.
You might share the post on Twitter at 9am, on Facebook at noon, and on LinkedIn at 3pm. If someone follows you on all three, they might miss one or more of these updates, but they are less likely to miss all three if you spread them out over the course of a day.
What has your experience been like with sharing your blog posts on social media? Do you ever feel inclined to share the same link more than once? Or does this feel too much like spamming your followers?