A blog is still a great way to spread the word about your business, share your knowledge with a potential customer base and provide evergreen content for your social media channels.
There are several apps out there that will help you share your blogs in different ways, allowing you to reach new people and expand your organic reach. They’re not all free, but they are work looking into.
Here are a few of our favorites:
SmarterQueue. SmarterQueue is a scheduling tool that allows you to reshare existing blog posts with new followers, or create new categories dedicated to new blog posts.
Once you sign up and link your accounts, you can create categories for your posts and social media platforms, allowing you to send specific links with specific wording to, for example, your twitter feed, facebook page or linkedin page.
SmarterQueue is particularly effective when you create multiple ‘new post’ categories, so you can assign new posts to different platforms. It includes an analytics feature, so you can see what your top performing content is and schedule it accordingly.
Have a good plan going into the trial, though: it’s only free for seven days. After that it’ll cost you $19.99 a month—or more.
Buffer. Buffer has been around for a while and is popular because it’s easily customizable. It’s a perfect tool for sharing new content, and it comes in a free or paid version (you get additional features with the paid plan, of course).
You can select a ‘shuffle’ option, which will randomly shuffle your posts or select the ‘move’ icon to simply drag a post to a new time slot. There’s also an automated ‘move to top’ link which you can use for new posts and then adjust time slots after that.
SocialOomph is another oldie, but a goodie. It is primarily a Twitter scheduling tool. Two of its best features are tweet intervals and spinning text.
Most scheduling tools require you to input a time and date and so on. A tweet interval allows you to share the same tweet at specific intervals (hence the name), such as every three hours, every two days and so on. Since Twitter is such a fast-moving medium, SocialOomph is a good way to ensure that solid copy is seen by more people. Once you choose the initial date and time to share your tweet, select ‘recurring publish’ and then choose a frequency.
Spinning Text is almost like a random generator; you enter multiple text variations for every tweet, and SocialOomph selects which one to post, at random. For a blog post, for example, with five key points, you’d write up a brief sentence about each, add the link, and the app would randomly select from those when it’s time to post.
JustRetweet relies on other people to do your sharing for you. It is sort of like a trade market. Members share each other’s posts to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ in exchange for credits. You earn credits by sharing other people’s content and spend credits by giving them to members who share your content. The more you share, the more you earn. It’s also a very active, engaged group.
It can take a little time to get going: When you log into JustRetweet, you’ll see a list of posts with a prompt to retweet or like. Most members offer 10 to 50 credits for a tweet or a share. You also select the platforms. Everything is recorded on your activity dashboard, so you’ll know what’s working and what is not.
Once you accumulate about 2,500 credits, you can submit a tweet for other members to share. Set the number of times you want it shared and the number of credits you’re willing to offer per share.
You put a lot of time and effort into your blog posts. They’re up there in cyberspace where anyone can see them, so make sure as many people see them as you can! Those are our favorites. Do you have any? Let us know in the comments!