How Can Social Media Monitoring Hrow My Blog’s Readership?

Blogging became popular circa 2005, and since then, there have been millions of blogs on the Internet, covering everything from aardvark enthusiasts to zipper technology advancement.

However, many blogs with more popular topics, such as health and fitness or making money online, have one critical problem: They don’t have any readers.

People who have just begun blogging, or blog solely as a hobby and have no profit motive, usually don’t fully understand what being a blogger actually means.

A blogger isn’t just somebody who writes on a Weblog; there’s a lot more to it than just writing. As a result, many, if not the majority of, bloggers write really good articles but they don’t know how to get people to actually visit their site and read them. Other bloggers know how to do this but could still do better.

Social media monitoring

Social media monitoring has been around for years and is used by marketers to both better target and measure the results of their campaigns. Bloggers could take a page from marketing books and adopt social media monitoring tools like Alerti to help them figure out ways to bring more people to their blog:

Find out who’s sharing your articles

People who share your articles on social media like Facebook and Twitter are usually your biggest readers. These people are thus highly targetable to affiliate marketing programs sent out by your newsletter, since they see you as a trust agent and will thus believe you by default that the product you are promoting is worth it.

Though there will not be a one to one correlation between people who repost your articles on their social media profiles and people who read your blog, you can extrapolate people who do and they are likely to a more profitable subset of your target audience.

Furthermore, people tend to have other people who are demographically similar in their social networks, so people who repost your articles on social media in the future will draw in similar people as time goes on, which will affect your demographics in the future.

Find out what articles work

Let’s face it: Everyone stands on the shoulders of giants. If there’s a hot topic that you haven’t written about yet that your readers would like, there’s no shame in writing an article about it after you read an article by someone else on the same topic.

While Twitter’s trending topics feature only allows you to find out what people are writing about, social media monitoring tools can show you whether people are reposting the same article. By setting a URL to an alert in Alerti, you can see each time somebody posts that URL, instead of only seeing whether people use descriptive keywords. Essentially, social media monitoring tools show you advanced “trends” across the entire social mediascape instead of just showing simplistic trends on Twitter.

Research your posts

Finding out what’s being said about potential sources on social media can also give you some good resources for your articles, since you can see what your readers will think about you using that source and whether or not they’ll think it’s credible.

For example, if people are reposting an article a lot and trust the author, other similar readers are more likely to trust what that article has to say so you can use it to back up your own claims. Plus, you can use these articles’ citations as “citation farms” since they are likely to have credible citations that people trust, and you can use those citations in your article just like the trusted article.

About murraynewlands

This is a guest post by Murray Newlands. Murray is the CEO and Founder of Influence People, an online marketing and PR firm based in San Francisco.

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