Our popular blog post “OK, You Wrote a Blog Post. Now What? How to #SpreadTheWord” discusses how to use social marketing to get your blog posts seen by more people. In that article we provided a step-by-step social marketing workflow of specific tactics you can use to build awareness of the blog, including:
- Email the post to your blog subscribers
- Share on your company Facebook page, Facebook Groups and if appropriate your personal Facebook page
- Share on your company LinkedIn page, LinkedIn Groups and your personal LinkedIn account
- Publish on LinkedIn Pulse
- Publish a series of tweets pointing to the blog
In this post I want to go deeper into the use of Twitter to promote your blog posts.
How often should you promote your content on Twitter?
Post frequency is a highly debated topic. But most every social marketing expert would agree that, unlike Facebook and LinkedIn where 1-2 posts promoting the same blog during a two-week period is plenty, it’s OK to post multiple times per day on Twitter—even to the same article. To show how this can be done, here’s Buffer’s Twitter schedule:
Twitter – 14 times per day, from midnight to 10:00 p.m. Central Time, never more than once per hour; seven times per day on weekends, from 3:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., roughly every three hours.
Questions: Are they right? Is this the schedule you should adopt?
Answers: Who knows. Maybe.
Every brand needs to discover its own ideal tweet frequency/schedule through experimentation. If you have a global audience, then you need to tweet regularly throughout a 24-hour day. If your brand’s customers are all local, then tweeting 24/7 is overkill. At HRmarketer, we average about 6-8 tweets per day. But when a major industry conference is taking place, we might tweet 50+ times per day. Whatever frequency you adopt, be flexible and pay attention to your analytics to see what’s working and what’s not.
As far as how many tweets you should post to promote a single blog post, it depends. One or two tweets is definitely not enough, but is 40 tweets too many? Maybe not, for a really popular, highly informative long-form (~1k words) blog post whose shelf life is more than three to six months. For this type of blog post you should absolutely publish multiple tweets several hours apart the day it is published with different messages, hashtags and images—and then schedule additional tweets in the future.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you publish a blog post citing a major research report detailing the reasons why top talent quits. This is what an HRmarketer customer recently did:
(1) Wrote 10 different tweets to promote the post on Twitter.
(2) Identified some hashtags to incorporate into the tweets. (HRmarketer’s hashtag recommender tool is a great way to identify hashtags for HR content).
(3) Created 7-10 images that visually tell the post’s story and draw attention to the tweets, like this:
Your images should help convey the key messages from the content they’re being used to promote.
(4) Developed a six-month tweet schedule to promote the blog post (~50 tweets).
A schedule like this can be time consuming to create each time you have a major blog post. This customer used HRmarketer’s new “Share Scheduler,” which makes it easy to (1) create and save for future use a schedule with multiple tweets at different times with different messages, hashtags and images and (2) measure the overall campaign’s effectiveness as well as the individual tweets within the campaign to help understand which times of the day, which images, and which messages work best.
Whatever tools you use to schedule social campaigns, test out some different schedules and see what works best. Remember, not every blog post merits 50 tweets. But some do, and for those you’ll find that the added tweets will add up to significantly more engagement and clicks to your content. Especially if each tweet uses different messages, hashtags and images. Oh, and don’t forget to make sure each tweet has a unique trackable URL (most social marketing scheduling software allows you to insert a unique trackable URL for each individual post).
Then adjust accordingly and have some fun.
If you’re a brand that markets in the HR space, feel free to give us a call or send us an email—we’d be happy to consult with you on how to create and analyze some different social marketing workflows for your content.
Oh, and you might also enjoy our post 2 Keys to Blogging Success That Many Brands Overlook.
