Can Social Media Give Your Pet Blogging A Boost?

Guest post by Blog Manager Robbi Hess

We trust that by now you know that blogging is a great platform to spread your expertise and knowledge and love of all things pet. We also hope you have jumped into the social media fray and are making your voice heard there. Blogging and social media work hand in hand. In the past some brands considered them mutually exclusive entities but no longer. A robust social media platform can feed readers to your blog and vice versa. 

There are five ways to grow your social media reach: 

1. Be a good listener. Social media is, well, social, but your listening skills are as important as your "speaking" skills. What are people saying? Listen in. Follow the trends. Look at how individuals behave on their social media pages -- emulate those you admire, make certain you don't pick up bad habits from those you don't. 

Set yourself apart. What do you have that is uniquely yours? In addition to having your own blogger and social media "voice" you need to find your differentiators. You may write about pugs and your friend writes about pugs... chances are you won't have the same take on them. Let your personality shine through your blogging and social media. 

Grow your network. Become friends with like-minded individuals. Follow their posts. Comment on their blogs and status updates. Be social! 

Use videos. In our hurry up society, individuals like video. They can watch on their smart phones, they can watch a video while they're multitasking. With the proliferation of smart phones and the emerging technologies, making a video is easier than ever! 

Know where you want to be so you know when you've arrived. If you are wondering if your social media efforts are paying off you need to know from when you came, right? Use bit.ly links to send people to your blog -- bit.ly makes it easy to track where your traffic is coming from. Look at who is retweeting you, or following your social media updates. Are there specific items that you're writing about that appears to be drawing the most retweets or click throughs? Find out what works and do more of the same! 

What are you doing to be found on line and to grow your pet reach?

Comments

[MizzBassie]

Oh my, I'm still learning. I didn't know about Bit.ly, will have to check that out. Right now, most of my traffic comes from Twitter and facebook friends and fellow bloggers. Purrrrrrrrrrrrrrs.

[Glogirly and Katie]

We are starting to see a lot of crossover from Facebook to Blog. There are some regular readers that just prefer to comment (even about blog posts) on Facebook. I love that it's been fueling engagement on Facebook.

..and yes, Bit.ly is awesome! I use it all the time for posting blog links on FB. It's fun to see which links generate the most traffic. For me, it's all about the photo I use along with the link.

purrs : )
Glogirly

[Robbi]

bit.ly is just a way to shorten your link and if you sign up for an account it will give you stats on where your traffic is originating from.

I agree, photos draw the reader in!

[PibblesNMe]

Great tips! I don't use bit.ly but my wordpress shows me exactly where my traffic is coming from. Awesome tools to have! :)

[Debbie (Doglady)]

Thanks for these useful tips! I do use social media as much as possible, but haven't tried making videos (not sure I'd want to just now, but who knows, in future?), or using bit.ly, yet.

[Carol Bryant]

You can also make your own custom short domain to reflect your blog's name. Like this:

A custom short domain is a great way to brand your content across the web! For example, the New York Times uses "nyti.ms" as a custom short domain, and TechCrunch uses "tcrn.ch".

These are the sort of things I've learned at BlogPaws over the years.

http://support.bitly.com/knowledgebase/articles/76741-how-do-i-set-up-a-custom-short-domain-

[Jodi]

I struggle a lot with the social medias. There are so many of them. I can barely master facebook, nevermind Twitter, Pinterest, Triberr, Google+...well you get the point. I use videos on occasion but not all the time, I do try to always use pictures though.

[caren gittleman]

This is fabulous advice...can't list everything that I'm doing because I am EVERYWHERE! Just like a turd! lol