Amanda Clark
Many small business owners start blogging with lofty ambitions of seeing their posts go viral—or at the very least, generating some solid activity across various social platforms. Often, it doesn’t pan out that way. In particular, business owners can quickly grow frustrated with the lack of tweeting their blogs attract.
Remember that content marketing is about long-term relationship building, so you’re probably not going to get a ton of retweets overnight. Also remember that it’s ultimately quality that drives engagement and social sharing—so eventually you may have to reckon with the fact that your blog posts aren’t quite up to snuff. If that’s where you land, reach out to Grammar Chic to talk about professional ghostblogging services!
But in the meantime, there are a few simple fixes that could lead to big gains in your blog tweeting—not necessarily instantaneously, but in time.
Make it easy to share your posts on Twitter. Specifically, add Tweet buttons to each post. This is an incredibly simple thing that many small business owners still neglect. Put a Twitter button either at the top or bottom of each post, or on a sidebar. You may even try a combination of places. The easier you make it for people to tweet out your post, the more likely it is that they’ll do it.
Ensure that your blog looks good on mobile devices. This is, after all, where most people do their tweeting. If you have to zoom in or out to adjust the wonky perspective, you need to talk to your website guru about a more mobile-friendly format. (Or, if you’re using WordPress as your CMS, you just need to go into the control panel and turn on mobile viewing.)
Work on snappy titles. And when we say snappy, we mean short enough that they can quite easily fit into a tweet, along with a link to the post. If your titles top 140 characters, you’re making them waaaaay too wordy. Additionally, play around with some of the battle-tested methods for generating headline attention—lists, tips, questions, provocation, etc.
Mention other industry experts. This is a great way to get some retweets, but make sure you do it gracefully. One thing we recommend: Quote an article or blog from an industry insider, then do an @ mention when you tweet out your post. Hopefully, that industry insider will see it and retweet to all of his or her Twittter followers.
Ask people to tweet out your blog posts. There’s no harm in asking, and there are plenty of ways to do it—on your e-mail receipts, thank-you pages, e-mail signatures, etc.
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