You know what sucks? Doing way more work than you have to.

One of the BIGGEST areas this has been an issue for us this year was in promoting blog content on social media. Wrapping up a successful blog post should have felt awesome, but instead we felt bogged down by the next task: promoting that post on social media.

We work across multiple social media platforms to promote our content on – and each one requires a different type of promotion. Formatting promotional posts for FOUR networks (plus newsletters!) for every post was DAUNTING.

But one day we realized: it doesn't make sense start from square one. 

If we took steps to make social media an integral part of our blogging process, we could perform more efficiently and save myself mountains of work. Nice!

So today we’re sharing that strategy with you. We bring you...

5 Easy Ways to Make Social Media Part of Your Blogging Process

Let's get started!

1. Write shareable and clickable headlines

This is a BIG one.

By going the extra mile to perfect that headline upfront you're doing yourself a huge favor when you go to promote your content later.

First off, investing a bit of time into writing a headline that's more shareable guarantees just that: that your post is more shareable for your audience overall.

But beyond that, writing an effective headline first takes some of the pressure off your next steps to promote your material: it automatically means that your caption or status will be playing support to that clickable headline and won't have to be the MVPs of your promotion.

Resource: The CoSchedule headline analyzer almost every week is so worth it! This is an amazing tool for pushing you to create the best headline you can. 

2. Invest in your intro

If your headline is the flashing neon sign that catches your reader's eye, your intro is the inviting atmosphere that makes them want to stay.

Intros ought to hook your reader immediately by creating curiosity, intrigue, or sparking emotion.

On Facebook, the very first couple hundred characters of your blog post automatically become preview text. Readers use this tiny snippet to decide if your article is compelling enough to check out. 

By perfecting that intro up front, you're saving yourself the time it would take to go in and customize that preview text. 

Plus, intro snippets make for great caption inspiration. 

Resource: This is a great article on types of introductions. It even has a helpful worksheet to get your creative juices flowing.

3. Always include shareable images

Okay, you guys: The internet is an inherently visual place.

Sharing and comparing images is how we tell stories and have conversations online. It's what we do!

As a graphic designers, this is AWESOME in our minds. Why? Because we love images: infographics, quote graphics, shitty stock photography, GIFs... It's all visual everything for us. 

By making the inclusion of shareable images part of your blogging process, you're setting yourself up for social media promotion success by building in options for images to pin, post, or tweet.

Why would you spend extra time hunting down images just for sharing purposes when you could build them right in?!

Resources: Check out Unsplash, Pexels and Pikwizard for some great (non-shitty) stock photography. They're both free to use and have a do-anything-you-want license!

4. Write shareable pull quotes

Write shareable pull quotes – and highlight them for your reader!

We’ve got two great suggestions for doing this:

1. Make graphics of your awesome quotes. This is a perfect two-birds-one-stone solution for highlighting your most shareable quotes and giving yourself images to share on social media platforms. Example: Check out the square text-based quotes we made for each suggestion. They're perfect for enriching our blog post content and sharing on social media, and that's exactly what we intend to do

2. Use bold or a heading style to make your quotes stand out within your text. No time to make text-based graphics? Set your shareable snippets apart from your main text in a visible way to make sure they grab the reader's attention. Shareable snippets are perfect for tweeting or using as captions!

Resources: We love Canva for creating quick graphics. Also check out Adobe Post if you're looking for an app with typography capabilities! Make sure to stick to your brand standards with ANY graphic you make!

5. Auto-post – but wisely!

Setting up an auto-post for each time you publish an article can be a great way to make sure you get the ball rolling as soon as you have content up.

BUT! Be careful what you set on autopilot. You don't want to overdo it and neglect one of the main points of social media: the social part.

Resources: We have an auto-tweet function set up through Bloglovin' that goes out each time we publish a blog post. We also use IFTTT to automatically tweet Instagram posts as inline images rather than links!

Working smarter rather than harder is always a win in our books.

It makes so much sense to fully integrate social media promotion into your blogging process rather than treating them as two separate tasks.

Since actively taking up the challenge to fully integrate the two, we've saved ourselves lots of headaches and unnecessary work. These strategies will get you the best bang for your time.

We hope integrating some of these tips into your workflow can save you time too! We'd love to hear YOUR strategies for blogging and promoting efficiently. Any suggestions?