One lesson I learned from all the blogs I read before starting my own blog is this: Mind how you share. In this post I’ll give you two tips plus reasons why you might consider trying them out.
1. Check every sharing button on your blog
This may sound silly but have you checked what happens if you click any of the sharing buttons on your blog? Serious bloggers have all manner of cool stuff added to their blog, like floating sharing bars, that make it easier to share their content – if it all works! You should be able to just share. But it doesn’t always work out that way.
However I wrote on this topic quite a while ago. My second tip is about something quite a few people don’t do – but they should!
2. Check your shared messages on social networks
If you’re on Twitter you may have noticed crappy tweets that stop mid-sentence because they were automatically shared to Twitter from another social network, like Facebook.
On the other hand, if you’re on Twitter and you share to Facebook automatically, you may end up with tweetlike stuff on your Facebook page. It’s why I added, tried, and then quickly removed my automatic sharing connection from WordPress to Facebook earlier.
Why share if you make it obvious that you don’t know, or don’t care, what your messages look like?
Using the Publicize option to share your blog posts
In case you’re not using it: on WordPress you have the option to connect several of your social network accounts to your blog. You can view and edit these messages just above the “Publish” button. Every time you publish, your message is shared to every account you’ve hooked up. Unless you uncheck the check boxes first. You can edit the message before you publish your post, but you can only send one message that’s identical for all networks.
A perfect tweet may well be a crappy Facebook update!
If you need your message to go out to several social networks:
- Skip those #!#! hashtags (for Facebook)
- Keep it short (for Twitter)
- Check the result every now and then, say every 5-10 posts (This goes for IFTTT recipes too).
The good part of automatic sharing
I’m mostly so relieved to have pressed the “Publish” button at 10 PM on Friday I then shut down my laptop and call it a weekend. Which means that unless I use this publicize option I end up not sharing the results of my thinking and writing on social media until much later.
Having my automatic messages in place means:
- I can concentrate on writing my posts and, after I finish them,
- I have more time to read other blogs and to comment on them.
- When on social media, I can focus on the social bit 🙂
If you feel it’s too much hassle to get onto social media AND figure all this stuff out AND actually be active out there so you decide to not bother at all, that’s completely fine by me. I understand and appreciate not bumping into your ‘zombie’ Twitter account 😉
That’s it for this year! See you here next year. If you’d like to add your thoughts about sharing please do so in a comment – I promise I’ll respond to your contribution!
Content Rambler 