How to Make Social Promotion Easy

While there are many ways to promote your blog articles through social networks, I have noticed an increase in messages via emails, groups, and forums formatted with options to push an article via a variety of sites.  They go beyond “here’s my latest article about this topic, hope you like it” to being well constructed messages with direct links to the articles on networks that the blog author would like their article to be promoted.

These messages help the blogger target the networks where they know their article will most likely be well received, beyond the major networks like Twitter and Digg. For example, a financial article is best placed on the Tip’d community, and a design article on DesignFloat. Plus it gives the potential promoter their choice of networks to use, as not everyone may feel a certain article will “fit” their audience on every network.

By providing an easy, direct link to the networks of your choosing for promotion, you stand a higher shot that people will promote it on those networks than if you just rely on them to visit the article and then initiate the social submission process themselves. Of course, good articles will always get promoted, but sometimes people who would normally promote something may pass it by because they are too busy to go through multiple steps, vs. having all their options neatly laid out for them.

As an example, here is how I will promote this article in a number of ways, including direct email, forum posting, and group bulletins.

Here is my latest article on how to make social promotion of your articles and webpages easy to use. If you find it useful, please share it on your preferred networks.

Main Article: http://kikolani.com/how-to-make-social-promotion-easy.html

Stumble: http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/kikolani.com/how-to-make-social-promotion-easy.html – Direct link to main article for those with a Stumble toolbar to easily thumb up, and/or direct link to article on the Stumble site for a review (because reviews count more than just thumbs up Stumbles).

Digg: http://digg.com/design/How_to_Make_Social_Promotion_Easy – Direct link to article on Digg once it has been submitted. You can get it by clicking on the number of Diggs by the story, or by clicking on the article link which will take you to the article with a Diggbar at the top. I have heard mixed reviews about Diggbar, so I still go with the first option.

Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/8hsco/how_to_make_social_promotion_easy_kikolani/ – Direct link to article on Reddit once submitted. You can get it by clicking on the comment link under the article.

Mixx: http://www.mixx.com/stories/5102739/how_to_make_social_promotion_easy – Direct link to article on Mixx once submitted. You can get it by going to the submitter’s profile and clicking on the link to the article under their submissions.

Twitter: How to make social promotion of your articles easy > http://bit.ly/WtoFB via @kikolani – Include the message you would like others to tweet, plus the shortened URL to the article. I use bit.ly for tracking purposes. Also, be sure to test your message so that it is under 140 characters.

There are ways on some networks (like Reddit and Mixx) to get the link to the article with a parameter at the end to automatically add a vote, but this does not always work, and people will assume they have already voted it, even though they didn’t. It’s always better to let someone do the vote themselves instead of forcing them to with the link.

Please note that the people and places you send this message to must accept these kinds of messages. People who have sent similar messages to you in the past for promotion of their articles, and forums or groups for social promotion and traffic exchanges are great places to start with this approach. Also remember to take time to review articles sent to you as well, as social media is a two way exchange.

And of course, if you do not want to push your articles this way, be sure to make it easy for people to find social network promotion links on each of your articles. Here are the plug-ins and buttons used for most of my articles:

If you would like to exchange social promotion emails, please contact me on Twitter, Facebook, or through the contact form with your email address so we can share and promote great articles! And if you belong to any social promotion communities, groups, forums, etc. that you would like everyone to know about, or have other easy social promotional tips, please share them in the comments below.

This post brought to you by Kristi Hines

Kristi Hines is creator of Kikolani which focuses on blogging tips and social networking. Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Kristi has written 310 awesome article(s) for Kikolani.

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