How these social platforms fit in your overall blogging strategy

Every day a new social media site seems to pop up, and we, as bloggers we often wonder whether we should sign up, if we’re missing out on anything if we don’t, how we’re going to keep up with all the content production, and what content we should even create for each platform.

It’s exhausting to think about, to say the least.

And I even understand deciding NOT to think about it at all. It happens, and it’s totally valid. A lot of times it gets very overwhelming for me as well.

Often we think staying on top of the social media game is a matter of being everywhere. While it sounds amazing, it’s not very sustainable, specially if blogging is not your main gig, and you have other responsibilities that are taking up most of your time.

I prefer to think ‘staying on top of social media’ means knowing which ones serve your purposes better, you’re most comfortable with, and you can sustain managing in the long term.

We use social media for two main things

• Promoting our content
• Engaging with the community

So, I’m listing here a few of the platforms bloggers usually manage for their online presence, and I’ll rate them according to how well -in my experience- they fullfill the two main goals I mentioned before.

 

Pinterest

Let’s start with Pinterest. It seems we run at three speeds with Pinterest.

• Don’t have one, don’t need one.
• Personal, sometimes use if I need to check something.
• Promotion machine.

I used to be in Category 2, until I just randomly started pinning some of my writing tutorial posts, and BOOM. Next time I checked, one of them was racking up saves like there was no tomorrow. Of course, next time I checked was a few months later.

Getting results isn’t something that happens overnight in any platform, but in Pinterest I was happy to see it was relatively low maintanance to do it.

Promoting

Pinterest is basically a visual search engine. Think Google Images times one hundred. I had heard that before, but I didn’t really get it until I began using it more on the personal side as well. I’ve found cooking recipes, ideas for hair colors, blogging tips, design trends… All these things lend themselves amazingly to being promoted AND found on Pinterest.

It stands to reason that it works the other way around as well.

I don’t have enough experience to guide you through an everything-you-need-to-know-about-Pinterest kind of post, but I’ll say this: Pinterest is one of the few platforms where you can promote your content on autopilot.

Engaging

Here’s where I’m not feeling Pinterest too much. There’s the option to comment on Pins, and there’s the Group Boards… but like I said, being more of a search engine, the platform doesn’t really strike one as a place where you can have conversations.

Most bloggers use Pinterest as their baseline promoting tool, and actively engage and talk to people elsewhere.

 

Facebook

Facebook is a weird place for me because most people do have an account, but do we use it? My personal circle mainly share memes! But how does it come into play when we talk about being a blogger and promoting new posts or finding people who share similar interests?

Promoting

The thing with Facebook is the Ad Manager, which is the hub for social media ads, since it covers both Facebook, Instagram, and even some in-app ads.

The other thing Facebook has going for it is Facebook Groups. This is where things become murky because Facebook isn’t as laissez-faire as Pinterest. You need to show up. You need to be in Groups and communities, and engage first, for the promoting part to work.

Engaging

Same goes for engaging. It doesn’t work unless you do. But when it does, it’s amazing. I’ve seen groups become treasured communities and it’s lovely. It almost has a forum-like quality, being able to comment on a post, and then a thread of comments form.

Overall, Facebook is a nice bet when you’re willing to go really deep into finding your tribe.

 

Twitter

I really wanted to get to this part of the post because it’s funny how much things change with time. Back in 2015 I was GLUED to my Twitter feed. I was constantly refreshing the thing to see what was new. I adored it because of how dynamic it is, and the fact that I could interact with bloggers and authors so easily.

It was revolutionary for me tweeting something about a book I loved, tagging the author, and having them reply.

Promoting

With Twitter we have to consider the simple ability to share unlimited links. Seriously, you don’t know what you have until you lose it, right Instagram? 

Threads of bloggers sharing their favorite blogs, spaces for self promotion, twitter chats… It’s a place where other users can easily discover new content and content creators to follow and support. There’s a thriving community on Twitter for bloggers to grow.

Engaging

We can’t deny that this platform was made for discussion. The downside is that Twitter has the bad habit of fostering a sometimes negative environment. However the snappy nature of the content makes it easy to engage with people. So, this site more than fullfills the ‘engage with the community’ goal.

 

Instagram

And finally, we come to Instagram! (Don’t forget to leave your handle in the comments if you have a bookstagram because I’d love to check them out!).

I’m personally in love with Instagram, even if sometimes it can be a bit toxic, with me losing sight of what’s important. But that’s something that happens with our blogs as well.

There’s a lot to love here, but same thing. Let me rate it by how useful it is for promoting, and engaging.

Promoting

Where Twitter is link paradise, Instagram is… the complete opposite, but… am I the only one who isn’t that mad at it? Sometimes it can be so, so incovenient not being able to add links to captions, and the restriction of only having the swipe up feature in stories when you get to 10k. But, I wouldn’t say it’s all bad.

First, let’s get this out of the way: Swipe up feature is the bomb, and if everyone had it, I’d probably rate this five stars. I don’t need links everywhere, but stories are the perfect placement for them!

The thing with Instagram is that at this point there are so many things you can do with it! You have stories, IGTV, Reels, the shop, and the ability to create and share AR filters… These are all ways we can promote our content, even if we can’t directly link to it. They’re interesting ways of building anticipation or expanding on something we could be talking about on our blogs.

Engaging

Instagram is amazing for engagement because of the same reason I mentioned before: the myriad of tools and options we, as creators, have at our disposal.

At the most basic level, we have comments, right? I feel like they don’t invite conversation as much as the Twitter interface does, but it just does the job, and that’s it.

But where engagement truly shines I feel is with stories. The stickers for polls, questions, quizzes, tags, and challenges. They’re all great and we can use them in so many creative ways!

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Do I need to be everywhere? Do I even need to be somewhere?

This is a question that has plagued me all these years of blogging. Ever since I realized that NO, people don’t just stumble across your blog. At least not until you’ve build up a couple of systems that get you some exposure and people can follow until they land on your blog.

At the end of the day, we need spaces for promotion and spaces for community interaction. Even better if we can have a two for one. Even better if we’re in more spaces, because that means more visibility, but only if we can really make it work.

For example, I love Pinterest, and it’s been working for me with the promotion side of my writing content, but that’s not where I interact with people. I do that on Instagram. And theoretically, I don’t need to be anywhere else, because I’m already doing those two things.

For bloggers who aren’t too fond of social media and do most of their interaction with other bloggers directly through the blogs: You’re not doing anything wrong, you’re not missing out. 

If you think about it, you’ve got interacting covered. Now you just need a way of promoting your work, which commenting and interacting also does, but I’d recommend giving Pinterest a shot, see if it’s something that can boost your content without worrying too much about constantly creating new one aside from blog posts.

And then maybe you’d like to promote your work more, so you get started with Twitter, or maybe you’d like to get more creative with engagement and you try Instagram…

Instead of thinking first or where we need to be, maybe we could approach it first thinking what we need to achieve, and then decide which platforms work better with that.

This post has been in mind for quite a while, and it’s kind of like trying to figure this question out for myself as well. I hope it helps you as much as the process of writing it did for me!

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What are the social platforms you like the most? Which ones would you like to try?

 

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