You can help drive traffic back to a company or brand’s website by turning a blog post into social media content. Promoting blog posts on social media gives them longevity and integrates overall marketing efforts – read on to learn how to do it well..

When looking for relevant shareable content for a company or brand, turning a blog post into social media content is the best starting point for spreading the word. They provide up to date valuable info for your audience, gives the company credibility as a thought leader in their industry and directs people to the website (helping to lead to that ultimate sale).

Whether you are looking for work as a Social Media Manager, or already have your clients up and running, you can use social media channels to promote a business’ best work and connect with existing and potential customers in new ways. As a Social Media Manager you will almost certainly be repurposing blog post content for social media. This post will help you understand the different ways you can get the message across effectively.

Change content to suit each platform 

When chopping up blog post content for social media, consider the platform you’re posting on. This can affect whether you chose to post a video, images, slideshare, text only etc, as well as the way you phrase captions and include links, hashtags and locations. The key is to create a social media blueprint for the brand in question – does their audience like video on Facebook? Maybe they respond best to a slideshare on LinkedIn or a series of tweets.

Consider the amount of time that someone will spend scrolling past your post and adapt the content to capture their attention in that time. Remember your ultimate goal is to get views on the blog and links through to the website.

Where to begin

After reading through the post in question, picking out a few key points and interesting quotes there are several steps to take:

1. Decide what platforms are appropriate to share the content:

Instagram post / Instagram stories / Instagram live / LinkedIn / Twitter / Facebook / Facebook live / Similar interest Facebook groups

2. Decide what the post content should look like:

Quotes on images / short summary video / Livestream / Infographic / Slideshare presentation

3. Create the content

4. Decide what time and days to post

5. Add to your social media calendar

Post content types:

  1. Quick quotes on images

Adding a visual element to your tweets can increase their visibility. You can grasp this by extracting quotable quotes from the blog post, and placing them over an image using a site like Canva to create visual graphics. Your image will need to complement your chosen quote or the title of your blog post. You can use a picture you’ve taken or a stock image from a royalty-free website such as Unsplash, Pexels or Pixabay.

Good for Twitter & Instagram.

Examples:

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bkr5XGjl-S9/

2. Short summary video

Video continues to be a popular way to consume social media and is a good way to get shares and engagement. You can convert the contents of a blog post into a short, social-friendly video. If you remain unconvinced about the power of video check out these stats from Wordstream:

  • 45% of people watch more than an hour of Facebook or YouTube videos every week
  • One-third of online activity is spent watching video
  • 92% of mobile video viewers share videos with others

Example:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BlBwM3OANuf/

3. Facebook / Instagram Live

Going live is a good way to announce the latest posts, generating greater organic traffic than text announcements. The more engaged your community, the more questions and comments you are likely to get on blog posts. A good way to get more interaction with a blog post is to run a live Q&A session on Instagram or Facebook. Users are loving real-time broadcasts and they’re a great way to promote a post and give extra value on social.

Instagram Stories are great for posting the news that the latest blog post is live. You can encourage people to interact with the brand through an online poll or pose a question on the blog subject.

4. Infographics

As visual aids, infographics work well on social, are easy on the eye, and easy to digest. They’re valuable nuggets of education that users find shareable and blog posts already provide the bulk of the content needed to convert into a visual graphic. You can find many infographic templates on Canva.

5. Presentation slides

A presentation-style Slideshare or Instagram multi-image post is fantastic for step-by-step tutorial-style content. These translate the post value to users on social and are likely to get a lot of shares and likes. You can use text directly from the content already written, encouraging users to check out the website for the full article.

For this style of content, we recommend LinkedIn or Instagram multi-image posts. LinkedIn tends to be more friendly to long-form content, and you also have the option of sharing longer sections of the post directly to LinkedIn.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BjFVAyFlXdP/

Pinterest 

Pinterest is slightly different from other social media platforms. As a visual search engine, pins tend to stay searchable over time. Some brands have argued that pins have more potential to go viral, and Pinterest tends to have profitable target markets as their users generally have a higher income. Gaining traction on Pinterest is a whole tutorial in itself, however, if the brand in question is already active on Pinterest, you can repurpose the post into a shareable pin.

YouTube

When it comes to promoting a blog post, YouTube works a little bit differently from other strategies mentioned above. Content for YouTube is very specific, the audience is more likely to be discovering you for the first time. Because of this, you will need to create relevant content that may not exactly be aligned with your blog post.

For example, to turn this blog post into a YouTube video we could:

  1. Create a tutorial-style video recording the screen, explaining the post as you scroll down.
  2. Create a video discussing how to create content for social media, with one of the points being repurposing content from blog posts. We could highlight that last, and then promote this blog post and say “click on the link below for more info about how to turn blog posts into social media content”

When all is posted – don’t forget to use analytics

You can track engagement with blog posts back to social media through analytics tools such as Google’s URL Builder. This can tell you a variety of data around the success of posts, including the number of clicks your link receives from the various social media platforms. This data can guide your future social marketing strategies.

Blog posts are prime social content for every social media manager, providing a base for creative energy. If you wish to outsource a social media campaign check out our services. How do you turn your blog posts into social media content? What has been most effective for you? Share your thoughts in the comments below!