You wrote something. Now what? You can automate. You can schedule. What works best? How do you start? In this episode, Jason and Bridget will give their tips and tricks to help get you going.
WomenWhoWP will have a booth at the WCUS Community Bazaar! – Bridget will be there, say hi!
Sharing and content management go hand-in-hand – whatever info you put into that CMS you are going to need to share – to get your story out there!
When blogging (and communicating on social) your voice and tonality need to match – that's what makes you authentic. Don't use authenticity as an excuse to be a jerk though! How you treat your audience matters.
Automation can be a problem – it can lack authenticity, you need to pay careful attention to what is being shared/posted – does it match your tone / your voice? Example: a politician that has a search that auto-posts any tweets mentioning her name (with no oversight!) … even bad tweets got retweeted! Or another example is if someone has automation and they've passed away.
Only 2 things automated on BridgetWillard.com – Postmatic (for commenting) and Revive Old Posts (auto tweets her own articles in a specified time period). Bridget believes in a hybrid solution of automation and hand-edited posts.
Another option (though controversial!) is to take advantage of the bots that auto-retweet hashtags of interest to your audience! The risk is that many people won't follow them because the account is obviously a bot!
Bridget would love if Revive Old Posts would make a meta box with alternate titles so it could reshare the same content with different text!
Scheduling posts can be helpful too – can also rearrange your info for repeat posts manually.
Setting automation is not a bad thing if it's in a controlled environment – if you have it set to pull from your own content or from sites that are trusted.
There's nothing wrong with clicking your own buttons/links! Go ahead and click the share buttons on your blog posts – half of what Bridget built into her site was for her own use, to make it easier to share her content!
Snowbird prides themselves on being an advanced ski resort so a 1-star review stating it was too hard was the perfect and most simple advertisement! They restrained themselves from adding a lot of design or copy and just let the review (and a powerful photo) speak for itself.
When you are sharing content multiple times, try reframing how you present it – say it in a different way to catch a new audience.
Tailor your content for your audience! When you are traveling to a different country or city, like Paris, you behave differently because of what the 'natives' expect. Think the same way with your content. If you sharing on twitter, post one way, on facebook, post another way. The same content presentation does not work for all audiences and you run the risk of fatiguing them!
Instagram is not for memes – they're really best on facebook!
Just start somewhere – start with one platform and use it for a few minutes each day. When you get used to it, add another platform and go from there!
There is no crazy secret to getting a lot of followers – be kind, be polite, be conversational, be interested. Reply to people! What would you say to people if you were having a conversation in person? Build relationships! From relationships come referrals 😉 Win-win!