Social media is one of the best parts of owning a blog. From having a place to talk with your followers, to collaborating and communicating with other bloggers – your social media channels are where you’ll thrive as a creator and gain exposure by sharing your content and interacting with others, too. Social media is also a pretty confusing minefield when it comes to setting up accounts for your blog. There are quite a number of networks out there, and it’s pretty easy to feel overwhelmed when you’re trying to figure out which networks you should be focussing on.
When I started Mile in My Glasses, I was given a great piece of advice: to only focus on one social media network at a time. Figure out the kinks, how it will benefit not only you but how you serve your followers – and then move on to figuring out the next. Instead of opening 10 accounts and doing not so well with any of them, it meant that I focused my energy on opening one at a time, figuring out how to make it work for me, and then going to the next. This is how I really strategised my Pinterest presence, which got me over 2 million (and counting!) monthly viewers, whereas if I was focusing on multiple social media networks at a time, Pinterest could easily have wilted to nothing under my shared focus on Instagram, Twitter and Bloglovin’.
When it comes to setting up your social media accounts, I go by two principles that I’m going to be sharing with you today. Two simple questions that help make sure that I’m opening each account for a valid reason, with something meaningful to offer and a strategy to lead myself on with.
How Do You Personally Interact With the Platform?
When picking a social media for you to start with – look at your own user experience. What do you use each network for? Is there a particular social media channel most aligned with your blog? Where do you go to read new blog posts – or keep up to date with your favourite bloggers? Do you prefer the text updates that Twitter thrives on or the candid videos of Instagram Stories?
The importance of asking this question is so that you can be clear on what the purpose of each channel is. If you’re offering the exact same content in the exact same way across each and every social media network, what’s special about any of them? Why would your followers join your network across each of them if they can get all of your information just by following one?
Here is where you want to create a ‘journey’ of sorts: that follows your content through your various social media networks for exclusively-tailored pieces of information. Don’t re-post your Instagram photos to Twitter, or if you do – re-jig the caption and optimise it for that network. Post content that’s specialised for each platform so that your followers are inclined to follow you from Twitter to Instagram to Pinterest and so on, so forth.
What Does Your Blog Have to Offer Each Platform?
You don’t need to have an account on every social media network under the sun if you don’t have content that is relevant to that platform. When I started MIMG, I truly thought I had to have every single social platform I could grab an @ on. There was an idea that you had to have it all, just so that you could cover your bases. And then, along with my journey of growing MIMG, I figured out that actually – I didn’t. My content is best served on Pinterest, Instagram and Bloglovin’ – so those are the three social media networks that I have.
My blog posts are optimised and strategised for Pinterest – so that they can be shared and re-posted on there, with my imagery also being complementary to my Instagram page, and my blog being indexed on Bloglovin’ so that fellow bloggers – and readers – can find it easily. I don’t have text-heavy anecdotes to share on Twitter, in fact, my candid thoughts usually find their way onto my Instagram Stories or highlights. And I don’t have a Facebook page because I don’t believe that neither my demographic nor my content is best served to be on that platform.
It’s not a bad thing not to fit the mould of every network – in fact, it’s better because it allows you to focus on the social media platforms that count. Put that energy into the strategy behind your social posts on the platforms they’re best suited for and you’ll see your content received in much better ways than if you were bending over backwards to post on a network that doesn’t fit with your style or content anyway.
These two questions – though they might seem obvious – have saved me so much time from following dead-ends that would have gotten me nowhere. I had a Twitter profile for a year before I deactivated it, because I wasn’t serving myself or those who followed me on there in the right way. Figuring out what you want to offer your followers is important, and doing so not only in the easiest way for them, but on the platform most suited to the content you want to share, is the best way to make sure that what you’re creating actually reaches the eyes of those that you want to see it.
Producing content that complements a social media network’s algorithm will benefit you in a million more ways than if you were trying to force your content into a mould that doesn’t fit your blog just for the sake of an algorithm that doesn’t represent you or your creative side in the slightest.
I’d love to know your thoughts on this topic, whether you agree or disagree – and what social media platform’s you’re most active on. As always, thank-you so much for reading and I’ll catch up with you next week!
What’s your favourite social media platform?
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