Internet Marketing Digital_marketing_for_dummies | Page 223

the social web; its followers are much more likely to discuss German music, Celtic
culture, or how the brain works.
Think about how your own business can expand conversation beyond the confines of the
products and services that you sell. Research and map the topics that are relevant to your
audience and what interests them outside your specific niche. Revisit the customer avatar
discussed in Chapter 1 if needed.
Socializing blog content
Most blog posts have a short life span. Even if you’re sending them to your email
subscribers, most blog posts experience the bulk of their traffic in the first 24 to 48 hours.
But how can you use social media to maximize the long-term impact of your blog content?
Through the process of social distribution, your blog post can live a long, happy life. This
process not only notifies social connections as soon as a post is published but also ensures
that the post continues to cycle through your social feeds for days, weeks, and months
afterward.
In the following sections, we describe six ways to properly share a new blog post on social
media.
Splinter
Splintering your content is the process of breaking off bits and pieces of it and posting
those pieces a là carte. When a piece of content is published and ready for sharing, you
have all the source material needed to splinter shareable content for social media posts.
You can splinter headlines, quotes, images, questions, and statistics found in your content
and distribute them across your social media channels.
Visualize
Visual content is necessary to drive engagement and clicks on social media. Buffer, a
software application company designed to manage accounts on social networks, saw an 18
percent increase of clicks, 89 percent increase in favorites, and 150 percent increase in
retweets by using images, which goes to show that you’re leaving a lot of distribution
reach on the table if you don’t incorporate images into your social strategy. The feature
image (which usually appears at the top of your blog posts) is typically the first visual
asset that you should share on social media channels. But one image isn’t enough; you
need to create a visual asset for every splinter. Quote images, a visual device with a simple
picture and a standalone quote, for example, are perfect for Facebook and Twitter. Don’t
think you’re hindered if you can’t afford a graphic designer. Canva
( https://www.canva.com/ ) is a free tool for creating images that you can share on social
networks. Just make sure that your images fall within your social media channel’s
guidelines. Figure 9-7 shows a quote from a DigitalMarketer blog post that was turned into
a quote image and then tweeted on Twitter.