This is the fifth article in the series Blogging 101 series.
We are social media promoters. If you are not using it with your business or in ministry and have great ideas, you need to start now. But at the same time, we argue that it is ONLY a tool and if it distracts from making sales or doing ministry, you need to just through it out the window.
Blogging is a completely different story. Social media is your marketing and networking tools to get the word out about what you have to say. Effective integration is important and here are four quick tips to start it well.
- Grow Your Network Make friends with people that have similar interests that your blog provides. Our tactic is to engage with anyone that talks about any form of ministry, blogging, or technology. Not only will it give you great new resources, but hopefully you will find a lot of new readers that will be very engaging with your blog.
- Appreciate Your Followers Just growing your network will not achieve success, you need to sustain the ones you currently have. When you do get new followers or fans, remember to begin a dialogue with people. Social media networks like Twitter have the issue of becoming very inauthentic and disingenuous with people and our conversations can help bring about a personal interaction with them. At the same time, share their content with your own followers and show them that you are engaging.
- Put Links On Your Blog Whatever social media that you are using, put at the top of your blog (what they call above the fold where everyone can see it instantly) so that people can easily identify what networks you are and add you quickly. Also, make sure your blog’s website is easily located on all of your social media about us sections.
- 80% Give – 20% Take There is a strong need to make your social media updates valuable so that people will continue to subscribe to you. We suggest to achieve this, that 80% of your tweets and status updates be you giving something to your followers and taking something from them only 20% of the time. When we say giving, we are talking about fresh ideas, links to the latest news you care about, or free stuff. Make sure that it benefits your followers. Keep advertisements to buy a book you wrote, reading your latest article, or leave comments on your blog to a minimum. Overdoing the “taking” can come off as spamming and you may lose followers and fans quickly.
How are you going to integrate social media into your blog?
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