Aug 30, 2012 / Beginner

Socialize your Blog

Remember that old saying that went something like, “Get new followers, but keep the old”? Okay, I may be stretching the truth a bit here, but one thing’s for sure: it’s always a joy to get new readers. Part of blogging is putting yourself out there to build relationships with those who come back to your site again and again.

As much as you love your current readership, it’s important to consistently draw in new visitors. Fortunately, social networking sites give us a plethora of tools from which we can choose to achieve this. Here are a few tips, for the total beginner to the seasoned pro, to help you make your social networking accounts work for you:

You can individually select which Publicize services to use on each post.

  • Publicize: WordPress.com’s built-in Publicize feature automatically shares your posts to any of the following services: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Yahoo! Updates. (Instructions for setting up Publicize are available here.) You can choose which services you share to, and can also turn the feature on and off on individual posts.

    Once Publicize is activated on your account, your site stats can give you a true reach of how many followers you have by including those on your connected accounts. For example, if you have 100 people who follow your updates on Facebook, they will also be counted among your blog followers on your site stats page.

  • Streamline your sharing: While you can manually share your posts to other services that may not yet be included in Publicize, there are also excellent tools cropping up that can help you manage your social networking profiles from a single hub, such as HootSuite.

    Other sites can help make the sharing process automatic. IFTTT, which stands for “If this, then that,” allows you to create custom sharing tools between your different online accounts, or what they call “recipes.” For example, you can create a custom “recipe” that says, “If I share a status update on Facebook, then publish it to my WordPress.com blog as well.”

  • Share more than your posts: Beyond sharing your posts, develop your online presence to connect with potential new readers. If your entire Facebook or Twitter feed is comprised of links to each of your new blog posts, that doesn’t make for an enticing read. Instead, shake things up with your own thoughts, photos on the go, or links to other blog posts that you’ve found interesting.

    For the Pinterest users among us, you can create a board that is specific to your blog posts. This allows visitors who are brought in by your various other pins to see a quick and easy overview of your blog’s archive.

Above all, remember that your blog comes first. You don’t need to be present on every single social networking site out there, but you do need to have content to share. As you build your readership and expand your presence to other social outlets, try what works best for you one by one and enjoy the new relationships that come from it.

Need some additional help with this? Check out the WordPress.com Support pages, forums, or contact Support with your questions!

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  1. I 100% agree with socializing your blog. The only slight change in recommendations I have would be to manually post your link on your Facebook page. If you use the publicize feature from WordPress, it doesn’t present you with a Share button in Facebook, so people can’t click to Share it beyond your FB page. If you paste the link in, then the Share button becomes activated and it has the reach to go further – won’t hit your site stats that way, but will hit your FB site stats.

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    2. Great tips! I really never noticed that links couldn’t be shared on facebook except when posted directly.
      I’ll try it out and check out the difference.
      Cheers!

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    3. Great point! I have noticed that about some blog posts and it did not occur to me to just paste them. I guess it is beneficial also because you can post a comment along with the blog post! Thanks for the tip!

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    1. Hi, I’m trying to figure out how to link my Pinterest board titled “Creative Writing” to my wordpress account. I followed the directions, and even put the Pinterest icon as “enabled service” but I can’t figure out how to get to appear on the boxes above that give you the option to “Connect” or “Disconnect” .. any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks – Heather

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      2. I too have pintrist,i havnt finished filling it out all yet,
        I like picking the pictures,but it just keeps saying pick more pictures, I like vintiage looking ,and some of the wall colors,maybe someone, can give me some advice,i would appresiate that

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  4. Sorry,I’m quite new here, what’s Pinterest? As for the publishig, I realize that I’m awfully aukward with my iPad and its tecnologies,but I’m going to improve,I promise! Thank you for any help

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      2. I second that, all the things I would have done in my life if it weren’t for the old pin board, but I love it and it has really helped me get together images which I want to use for future posts and also formulate ideas about the things I really want to write about.

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    2. Certainly, social networking is definitely not one-size-fits-all 🙂 If you’re blogging about something related to your field, linking your site to LinkedIn might be a good fit. Otherwise, it may not work for you.

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    3. It depends on who your contacts are and what they enjoy. My blog posts have been on LinkedIn since I started blogging in 2008 and it has been an additional source of contacts/connections. After all, we are more than our professional titles. Our blogs show our creative, independent side… Of course, it also depends on what we post about. It as worked well for me. 🙂

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    4. It’s true that what you post is what you see. I separate my personal and my business world (i suppose the new school concept would be “network or group”). You can set up a professional blog, Twitter, and Facebook for example, and link to LlinkedIn, and keep all your personal tweets and Facebook wall off LinkedIn. It is a lot of work to manage, but if your posting anyway, is it really a lot of work? I don’t think so for the results.

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  7. “Get new followers, but keep the old”…

    Isn’t that what they started teaching Girl Scout troupes to get them to get their friends to follow the Girl Scouts Twitter account? ;-P

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  8. Thanks for reminding us all that blogging is a form of social media. When I first started blogging, I did it in almost a vacuum, not really thinking about it as a way to connect with other people and socialize. Now that a few years have passed and I’ve been roaming the blogosphere and interacting, commenting, and following others, it’s become something more than just sharing my thoughts and writing about what I do. I feel like I’m part of a community, and it’s wonderful to be be here.

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  9. You’ve beaten me to the punch! I was in the middle of writing the same thing and yours broke out first! It’s okay, no hard feelings. Great minds think alike (yours great, mine not too much). Good one, good one.

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  11. Doesn’t work – In settings I’ve pulled down the icons to enable them but on each individual icon there’s no hyperlink to connect them in the enable box. When I publish a post the social icons (FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest) do not appear. Not sure what the problem is.

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    1. Hi Pat, it looks like you’re using Jetpack on a self-hosted WordPress site. Is that right? Would you mind emailing us here so we can help you out?

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  14. Psyched about “creating a pinterest board specific to my blog” I went there and found no help whatsoever in how to do that. How does one “create a board specific to ones blog?”

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    1. Go to my pinterest board http://pinterest.com/Emotfit/

      I have two blog boards, a board where I promote some of my Emotional Fitness Exercises, A Better Blogging and Writing Board, an E authors and bloggers board, two Blog Hop boards. One for parents and one for various blogs. I also have a number of other boards, but these are the ones supporting bloggers including my own.

      Hope this helps.

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      1. Thank you. I saw your boards, and I still do not understand HOW to set up a board for a blog. Do you manually pin each post to your blog board? I saw no place on “pinterest setting up board info” for leaving an URL to automatically load blog posts (as they do on goodreads.com).

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      4. Pam, Every pin goes back to the place it stared. I do pin each of my blog posts manually, but it only takes a minute. Clicking on one of my blog hop pins will take you to the person’s blog and to the post that I pinned to the blog hop. At least I think that is how it works.

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      5. Katherine – I’m so new to Pinterest and went to your boards and was impressed at what you’ve done. Also noticed in your bio on one of your boards that we have some things in common. I’ve lived in Colorado for over 43 years but came from a small town in PA – Norwood near Chester. My sister and husband live in Kennett Square. Small world but felt I wanted to connect to you.

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    2. Hi Pam, when you use the Pinterest bookmarklet and are logged into your Pinterest account, you can select the board that your post is pinned to. That means you’ll have the option to pin your post to your “My Blog” board (or whatever you may choose to call it) when pinning each of your posts.

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      1. Thanks for your reply. It’s what I surmised. Each post would be a manual posting–unlike the automatic posting that happens via wordpress to twitter, facebook, tumblr, LI, etc.

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  17. To get more new readers we have to socialize our blog in social network site like Facebook and Twitter. But in wordpress we just can share once in facebook :-(. We have to use third party site to socializing our post in group, page, friends at the same time. I hope wordpress can socialize it without third party

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  22. Thank you for the recommendations for interacting with readers while increasing the number of followers. I have not tried adding my blog to Pinterest yet, which is a fantastic suggestion. I am too distracted by all the food on Pinterest, I suppose!

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    1. I was able to make a pin board, but can’t figure out how to connect it to the blog. Can you explain how you did it? Thanks

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  25. Has anyone noticed that facebook relegates your post off to some dark corner of no one’s news feed if you use publicize? I started just copying and pasting the link because it seems to get more attention that way. Anyone else have some insights on this?

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  26. I write for several blogs.
    How do I share the same post over them all, without time-consuming copying and pasting?
    I’m writing for children and they want me to share my posts on their blogs but as proper posts – not as re-blogs.
    Problem is, by the time I’m done writing the posts, I’m too tired to copy them over to another six blogs.
    Someone please help!

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  29. I’m trying to figure out how to post a blog to Pinterest – I can post a photo but not a blog post. Can you explain or show me an example? Thanks

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