Blogger vs WordPress Blog

Sharing content like blog articles on social media is a great way to build your audience and get traffic to your site, and no doubt you're already doing it on Facebook and Twitter. But the mistake a lot of people make is sharing content on each channel only once.

I know, because that what we used to do.

The fact is, when you spend so much time creating content like we do for our blog, it makes absolutely no sense to share it on our channels just once. Why? Because there's every chance people won't see it. How often do you go back through the social feeds of websites you like and click on old content? Exactly. By sharing content only once, a huge chunk of our audience is likely to never know a post we spent hours putting together even existed.

This is why sharing content more than once makes so much sense. Sharing multiple times increases the odds of catching people who didnt' see it the first, second or even third time.

Kissmetrics explains how resharing works in this excellent article. But this quote from the article sums it up really well:

"Your social media followers aren't like RSS subscribers who see and read every post. In fact, sharing more than once probably is an essential part of providing your audience with the value you promised them. If you don't share your links a few times, they may never see any of your updates."

While it's important that you don't re-share multiple times to your social accounts with the exact same content (boring and repetitive!), you can re-frame content in lots of different creative ways.

For instance, say you've got a post about WordPress backup plugins that you want to share. The first time you tweet about it you could use the title and link, and then next time you share it pose a question:

Straight and Easy: Post Title + Link

The Question: Ask an engaging question to stir conversation

Cite a Fact: Share a fact or figure that is included in your post

Share a Quote: Grab a pull-quote from your article and turn it into a social message

Add Intrigue: Write a teaser message that grabs the attention of your readers

The great thing about framing your content in different ways is that it can also help you gain insight into what works best with your audience, i.e. do your readers prefer a "straight and easy" approach, or are questions better for encouraging clicks?

We continually experiment with our social accounts (as everyone should, it's good practice) and started re-sharing our content, but we quickly found there there was some content that we wanted to keep on sharing on an ongoing basis. What was this content? Mostly promotion stuff, like the fact we provide 24/7 support for any WordPress issue, that we have a bunch of awesome plugins available for free at WordPress.org, and that we offer a 30-day free trial.

Our members all know about this stuff (we hope!) but we probably don't promote it as much as we should. So we wanted to do something about that.

So we started looking out for a tool to help and stumbled upon MeetEdgar.

What is MeetEdgar?

MeetEdgar is a handy service that helps you recycle social updates automatically. It works by organizing all your social posts in categorized libraries, like "blog posts," "tips," "inspirational/funny."

You can then schedule your content by category and choose which days and times you want Edgar to automatically pull and publish content from your libraries. A cool feature is that you never need to refill your queue – Edgar moves through your content and then starts recycling older updates, ensuring your posts will be seen by a new audience, bringing more traffic to your site.

How We Use MeetEdgar

We really only use one category: promotional. Our queue is filled with posts that, as I mentioned recycle through all the cool features we offer that we always forget to tell people about!

Currently, our schedule is set on a random setting as we're still testing and experimenting with MeetEdgar, but what we have noticed is:

It's super easy to use – just like scheduling posts and tweets as you would for Facebook and Twitter

It saves a bunch of time – instead of scheduling a message to go out only once, we can schedule messages that are recycled over time

It's hard to measure just how effective re-sharing our content has been since it's still early days, but what I can say is that we're now sharing important promotional content more often and that can only be a good thing. Doing this is more about brand awareness, letting people know what we offer, and just generally being pro-active about sharing all the cool stuff our developers build!

Summing Up

So there you go, just a little insight into one of our social media experiments. We've found MeetEdgar to be really helpful in spreading the word about what we offer.

Next time you see one of our promo posts, you'll know why you're seeing it and how we pushed it with MeetEdgar.

If you're not already sharing your own content more than once to your social accounts, I encourage you to check out the Kissmetrics post I linked to earlier in the post and read up on recycling your content.

Source: Why You Should Share Blog Posts More Than Once on Social (and How We Do It with MeetEdgar)