How to Promote Your Blog Using Facebook, A Quick Guide

How to Cross Promote Your Blog Post on Facebook

There’s a lot of freedom on Facebook when it comes to presenting your content.  You can use text based posts or combine your text and image for better engagement.  Videos work as well to spread your message.

Facebook allows a posting with practically no limit for the length of your post.  However, only the first 480 characters are displayed in your Facebook stream.   The rest of your post is hidden behind the “show more”-button.

You need to have the important points of your message into these first 480 characters.  Doing this is crucial because people tend to skim your content, picking off the main points.

How to Share Your Blog Post on Facebook

Facebook allows you to promote your blog post on your profile, your pages and in Facebook groups.  If you publish a video or image with your blog post it ellicit’s the best response:

• Including images and asking questions with your post creates more engagement.
• Posts with less than 50 characters are more engaging than longer posts.
• Posts that link to longer form articles over 1,000 words get the most engagement.
• Posts without hashtags get more interaction, but are more difficult to find.
• Personal comments work best.  After sharing a post always add a personal comment telling why your followers shall read, like or share your post.
• Ask questions to get more response: What, Why, Who, When, Which, Would, How.
• Directly embedded videos get over six times more engagement than embedded YouTube videos.

The 7 Most Popular Types of Posts on Facebook:

• Photos without links
• Question Posts
• Video
• Giveaway Posts
• Links with or without images
• Coupons/Promotions

How Often Should You Post on Facebook?

• Promote your blog post once for initial promotion.
• Engagement increases with more than one posts per day, but decreases with more than two posts.
• Share your blog post on your profile, your page and in groups, at different times and with different comments.
• Re-share your evergreen content every 2-3 month, but only on your profile.

What Are the Best Times to Post on Facebook?

It does matter when you are hitting someone’s inbox.  There are better times to be posting specifically for each platform.  And they even vary depending on which day of the week it is.  To help me post at optimal times, I use a social management tool called, Blog2Social.   For most posting to Facebook the following hours would work best.

• In the afternoon from 1 p.m. – 4 p.m.
• in the evening from 6 p.m. – 10 p.m.
• These hours apply also on weekends.

How to Extend Your Social Media Reach by Posting Branded Images

We've all heard the expression that "a picture is worth a thousand words."  That has never been truer than in the today's digital world.  Do you want to extend your content's reach across social media and the World Wide Web?  To do that you need to create shareable images that people love to share.  

Visual content is increasingly important for blogging as well as for posting on social networks.  Posts with images or videos are much more likely to get attention than posts with just plain text.

Sharing your posts images successfully will extend the lifetime of your post and will also have an impact on your visibility in the search engines.  Design your images with links to share on your social media platforms.  This will give you more possible search hits and backlinks to your blog.  

Sharing your blog post images on social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, and others will multiply the reach for each of your blog posts.  For the best results your images should be produced in different sizes to work best for specific applications on the different social media platforms that you use.

These Tools Can Maximize Facebook Usability:

• fanpagekarma:  Analyze your profiles – and your competitors. With KPIs, analyses, and reports. Monitor your success and increase your social reach every day.
• Blog2Social: Auto post, cross promote, schedule, automatically share your blog posts to social networks for the best times to post to profiles, pages and groups.
• Likealyzer:  LikeAlyzer helps you to measure and analyze the potential and effectiveness of your Facebook Pages.
• Pagemodo: Pagemodo simplifies Facebook Advertising from start to finish. Create your ad in the intuitive design studio, reach your audience with simplified targeting tools, and optimize future Facebook ads with user-friendly analytics.
• Heyo:  Use Heyo to easily create sweepstakes, contests, and campaigns that publish to mobile, Facebook, and anywhere on the web.