Facebook

The site that pretty much invented social media is still the Big Daddy. In the United States, according to a September 2014 Pew Research Center report, two-thirds of adults use Facebook, and half of those users say they get news from Facebook. “Facebook is an important source of website referrals for many news outlets,” the report states.

For drawing readers to your website or blog, “Facebook is definitely the most effective,” says Kailani Koenig-Meunster, multimedia editor at msnbc.com. “It isn’t my favorite, but it does bring the most traffic. A lot of it has do to with just that’s where people are—and that’s where normal people are, whereas Twitter can sometimes seem like journalists talking to other journalists. Everyone’s on Facebook. My mom is on Facebook.”

How can you use it to drive traffic to your blog?

• Build a separate page for readers of your blog to “like.” When you start your blog, create a new page for it on Facebook. Think of this blog page as your “brand page.” First, bring over the friends from your personal account. Then use the Facebook search bar to find bloggers or websites featuring topics similar to yours. If you “like” their pages, and “friend” them, odds are they will “like” your page, too.
• Link all your blog posts to Facebook. Every time you publish a new blog post, go to your blog’s Facebook brand page and post the link. Make sure you choose “public” from the drop-down menu at the lower right of the status box so that anyone on Facebook can see your status and so search engines can easily find it, too.
• Post what others will want to share. Few things build your blog audience faster than people “sharing” the link to your blog post. When you write a line or two about your blog post in Facebook’s status box, try to write something that: (1) doesn’t give away too much of the story; and (2) people will want to “share” with their Facebook friends. When Sarah Platanitis, a food blogger for masslive.com, put the link to her post about a local chef appearing on the TV show Top Chef, she wrote: “Sharing my interview with Stacy Cogswell, the hometown girl on Top Chef Boston. She’s the most likeable chef I’ve ever met.”
• Keep your Facebook updated. Do not neglect your Facebook brand page. Evan Allen covers crime and courts for The Boston Globe. She was on the team awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing. She recommends giving a “clear and simple” explanation of your expertise on your brand page. Include contact information in a way that’s easy to find and up to date. “There are dead Facebook pages all over the Internet,” Allen says. “If you haven’t posted in months, I’m moving on.”

Twitter

The pros use Twitter. A 2013 survey of more than 1,000 journalists by two professors at the University of Indiana found that more than 80 percent of the journalists used social media to “pull” readers to their work, and two-thirds of the journalists said social media engage them more with their audience.

Matt Porter, a sports reporter at the Palm Beach Post in Florida who covers the University of Miami Hurricanes, writes a blog called the Canes Watch. Porter, who has more than 8,000 Twitter followers, says he gets more response from Twitter than Facebook.

By maintaining a consistent presence and interacting regularly, and often casually, with readers on Twitter, Porter said, he has seen the number of people visiting his blog increase.

But as Twitter users know, Twitter often seems an unending stream of noise, trivia, and inanity. It takes hard work to make your Twitter account heard amidst the 140-character din. Here are some tips on how to build an audience of Twitter followers:

• Give your blog’s Twitter account a clear and easily understandable name. If you’re writing a blog about restaurants in Portland, don’t name your account @AmandaEatz53. Call it @ThePortland Gourmet. “If your Twitter handle includes a ton of apparently random letters/numbers,” says the Globe’s Allen, “you’re just going to fall through the cracks. Your goal should be to make your expertise clear, obvious, easy, fast.”
• Use a real photo of yourself. Twitter works best when it creates connections with other people, and few things help others connect with you than seeing your face. The photo (called an “avatar”) should be high-quality and tightly cropped to show just your face with a bit of background—a photo of you walking down the beach with your back to the camera or with four of your friends at a party isn’t going to make a connection. Twitter automatically resizes all avatars to 73 by 73 pixels on a desktop computer, which is about three-quarters of an inch by three-quarters of an inch. But Twitter allows readers to click on an avatar to make the image larger. When you create your avatar, you should make it about 300 by 300 pixels.
• Write a profile that describes you and your blog and be sure to include the URL of your blog. Twitter profiles can only be a maximum of 160 characters, so be precise and concise. That 160 characters, though, can leave you space for just a little bit of personality. If you are @The PortlandGourmet, your profile could read: Blogging news and reviews about the Portland restaurant scene. Culinary school grad and former chef. Lover of dogs and reality TV shows. http://portlandgourmet.wordpress.com.
• Build your list of followers by searching for people with an interest in your topic area and following them. Twitter has a much better and more precise search capability than Facebook. It is called, simply enough, Advanced Search (twitter.com/search-advanced). Abbey Niezgoda, a reporter at WVIT in West Hartford, Connecticut, said discovering the Advanced Search made Twitter much more useful for her. “You can search tweets in a location (miles of a certain zip code), with certain phrases, etc.,” she said. “The options are endless and it’s a great way to connect with people on Twitter.” Says Koenig-Muenster at MSNBC, “I’ve gained followers by just following other people. I’ve developed a rapport with other people around the country because I followed them and they followed me back.”
• Don’t clutter your tweet with unnecessary hashtags and mentions. Three professors (from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and the Georgia Institute of Technology) asked volunteers to rate 43,000 tweets, and “the overuse of #hashtags and @mentions” was one of the most common complaints. Still, avoiding abuse doesn’t mean abandoning all use. “I feel like hashtags get a bad rap because young people use hashtags like #throwbackthursday and #sundayfunday,” Niezgoda says. “But hashtagging a city like #Hartford helps the reach of your Tweet because people often search Twitter hashtags to see what’s going in their city/town and just the simple hashtag sign (#) can help them find whatever you’re tweeting about.” Koenig-Muenster agrees, and she says using the right hashtags can help you gain new followers. “I’ll still use them for specific topics,” she says. “If I’m writing about the New Hampshire Senate race, I’ll use #NHSen, and I’ll get new followers.”
• Take the time to write an effective tweet. “The art of writing a tweet is difficult,” says Koenig-Muenster. “It can take several minutes.” The three professors who studied which kinds of tweets readers responded to most positively found the three “most-liked categories” of tweets were: (1) questions to followers; (2) informational sharing; and (3) self-promotion with a link to the tweeter’s work. Just so you know, the professors found the “most strongly disliked categories” were what they called “presence maintenance” tweets (such as “Hello Twitter!” or “I’m here. What’s up, guys?”), conversation (discussions between users), and the tweeter’s current status (“I’m at the gym!”).

Porter has two guidelines for using Twitter: Self-edit and Think hard before you tweet.

“About half the tweets I write I never post,” Porter says. “Self-editing is a huge part of successful Twitter use. Be highly critical of your work. If you think you’re being funny or smart or wise, take a second to re-think the tweet. Word choice is so critical when you have 140 characters. Pick the right ones.”

Adds Porter, “Not tweeting is often the best move, especially when it comes to controversial topics. How many times have you seen someone (a brand, for example) try to be funny or amusing and completely fall flat, leading to apologies and Twitter mob shaming? If you’re unsure about it for a second, don’t tweet.”

Jenny Li-Fowler, web editor and social media manager for Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, says, “You want your tweets to be like a nugget of information that people can share at a party, that make them feel smart or clever or witty … You want them to say, ‘Guess what I read on the Kennedy School Twitter feed?’”

For example, researchers at the Kennedy School found that the cancellation of school days because of snow doesn’t harm children’s education. Instead of saying something formal in a tweet, Fowler says, it’s better to be more conversational. You might say, “‘Kids not missing out on learning because of snow days,’” Li-Fowler says. “Tease with something interesting and specific. Give them the nugget instead of something formal.”

What does Li-Fowler mean by “formal?” Here are a couple of formal tweets about Harvard scientific studies that Li-Fowler did not write.

Not a very interesting tweet, and, by the way, what the heck is IPCC? Are we supposed to know? Twitter is a mass medium. Don’t expect your audience to understand obscure abbreviations and references. Nor should you expect them to rush to stories promoted by dull tweets such as the following:

That may very well be what the study says, but surely it contains more specific advice to the NCAA than its concussion policy “needs improvement.” (The abbreviation NCAA, by the way, for National Collegiate Athletic Association, is widely enough known in the United States to be acceptable here.)

By the way, both of the above tweets use the formal “A study says …” construction. Li-Fowler’s tweet about snow days and kids avoided that.

Scott Kleinberg

“Be yourself and the audience will be attracted to you”

Scott Kleinberg, who calls himself a “social mediaologist,” is Social Media Editor of the Chicago Tribune. He writes So Social, a social media advice column, and founded the Tribune’s blog iPhone, Therefore I Blog.

Scott Kleinberg

What have you found to be the single most effective social media tool for bringing readers to your website/blog? Twitter? Facebook? Some other tool?

This will vary depending on audience, but for me it’s Twitter. I feel like my Twitter followers are engaged. Facebook certainly helps, but Twitter is my favorite. I also use a scheduling tool for tweets called Buffer (https://bufferapp.com), which helps by allowing me to spread out content yet be consistent. (Using the Buffer app, a tweeter can write tweets and then tell Buffer what day and time you want the tweet posted to Twitter.)

What is the most effective mix of social media tools for bringing readers to your website/blog?

The perfect mix to gain traction/readers involves Facebook and Twitter, but also good engagement. When I do social media, I stand by a tested method that works called The Rule of Thirds.

• One third of the time, you talk about your brand and your thing, and you link back to your content on your website.
• One third of the time, you talk about things related to your brand and your thing, but you link to another website. Not yours.
• One third of the time, you are you. Be personal. Answer questions. Talk about the weather. Show your personality.

This method is what shows people that I am human. And it ensures that I engage in social media versus broadcast. I can’t stress enough how important that differentiation is.

[Here’s a tweet from Scott, who got held up trying to enter a building because two people kept talking as they went through the entrance’s revolving door: So let’s talk about conversations while going through a revolving door. Really? Can you not wait 2 seconds?]

Are Twitter hashtags still an effective way of getting people to your website/blog?

They can be, but I definitely don’t rely on them. A hashtag is really intended to keep a group of tweets about one subject together for easy viewing. It was never intended to be an engagement tactic. But if enough people are using a hashtag about a subject, I will as well. During the World Cup, the use of the #WorldCup hashtag provided a big boost in engagement and numbers.

What are your guidelines for writing an effective Facebook status and an effective tweet?

• They must be entertaining, useful and personal.
• No abbreviations other than main ones like FBI and CIA. No “2” for “to” or anything like that.
• For a tweet, don’t use all 140 characters. My tweets are always 121 characters or less to allow room for someone to type RT @scottkleinberg.

What advice would you give a young blogger trying to build an audience using social media?

• You have to be consistent. You can’t just tweet once a day or a few times a week and expect it to matter.
• You have to be human. The Rule of Thirds will help your mix, but you have to show that you aren’t all about links back to your site. Be yourself and the audience will be attracted to you.
• Have a thick skin. Never, ever delete comments. People are going to say mean things. You have to learn to take it and handle it with poise and grace.
• Know your audience. Learn the demographics. Learn when your audience shares the most so you can time your posts correctly.
• Don’t be on a social media platform solely because it exists—be there because your audience is there.

Other Valuable Social Networks

Be Johnny Blogseed: Wherever You Go, Spread Your Blog

If you’re listening, you’ve joined new social media sites and updated all your bios to link directly to your blog. What now? Here are a few more ways to promote your blog:

• Add the Web address of your blog to your email signature. Any email program allows you to set up a signature that will appear, automatically, at the bottom of every email you send.
• Invite guest bloggers to write for your blog. Many blogs today feature more than one blogger. By inviting others to contribute to your blog, you not only add more voices and ideas to your blog, but you build your audience. Most blogs start off being read primarily by family and friends. If you have guest bloggers, you expand your audience to their family and friends, too.
• Make it easy to subscribe to your blog. In Chapter 3, we explained how to use RSS readers to build yourself a daily reading list of blogs and other websites. If you want to send emails to a list of people each time you publish a new blog post, you can do it using mailchimp.com. The website allows you, for free, to send emails to a subscriber list of fewer than 2,000.

If you’re really ambitious, you can even use your feet. If you write a local blog, you can meet your readers in the flesh by creating meet-ups. That’s what the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, once a print newspaper, did after it launched The Big Blog when the paper went all digital in 2009. The Big Blog set up weekly meet-ups in Seattle coffee shops. Other bloggers were invited, as was anyone who read The Big Blog. Sometimes the Post-Intelligencer would bring along a “draw”: a weather blogger, for example, or a local person who had appeared on the popular American TV show Dancing with the Stars.

“I met so many interesting people,” says Koenig-Muenster, a Seattle native who liked to go to these events. “It developed a buzz. It can be important to get out from behind the computer and put a face to the people who comment.”

Don’t Substitute Self-Promotion for Substance

Let’s pause a moment to remember something. Your success as a blogger is going to rely on more than social media networks and social meet-ups. Don’t forget that discussion of voice (see Chapter 4, “Writing as Rap”), or the notion of the special relationship between a writer and reader.

Or, to put it another way, you’re not just a blog, you’re a person. You have a purpose. Yes, we have suggested a variety of ways to get curious readers to click on your link and settle down for a moment to read what you have to say.

But if what we have suggested in this chapter can get readers to come to your blog, only you can get them to come back again and again. You have to give readers what they want: helpful information and intelligent opinions, perspectives, and guidance. Posts, in other words, that readers will find both useful and a pleasure to read. You also have to give them something of yourself.

“If you’re a person who’s overjoyed about your cereal or dismayed at your awful airline experience, that’s who you are, but I don’t want to read about it,” says Matt Porter of the Palm Beacon Post. “Said a different way: quality over quantity.”

Quality and personality. It’s that voice your social media posts can convey, too.

“I would say 90 percent of my [Twitter] use is work-related,” Porter says. “[But] I include a couple real-life tweets here and there to remind people I’m a real human and to try to keep things light and amusing. Everything you post comprises your personal brand.”

Adds Li-Fowler: “You don’t want to sound like a robot or like you have a set pattern for everything … not like you’re just cutting and pasting the headline. You want to sound like a person who’s offering a good nugget of information to people … Make every Tweet individual.”