By Walter Elly
Senior Director of Internet Marketing

Facebook and Twitter are now taking on and taking over Google and RSS feeds as preferred methods for people to find news and information. It’s time to make sure your blog is up to speed for competing in the stream. Here are three best practices to keep in mind when sharing your blog posts via Facebook and Twitter:

Best Practice #1: Attach a hero shot

Every blog post needs a graphic, something that will help illustrate your point. When a graphic is located on a landing page MarketingSherpa calls this a hero shot, and their studies have shown that having one increases conversion rates within those pages. For blog posts the same is true – including a hero shot engages the user more effectively. In addition, using imagery within your blog will make the overall blog easier to read and digest from a user experience perspective.

When it comes to sharing your blog post on Facebook, a hero shot is vital. This is because Facebook looks for a graphic to attach to your post when you share it. Not including a hero shot means Facebook will default to something generic such as your company logo, or worse, no graphic at all. If you can leverage a hero shot that’s both illustrative to your point AND graphically compelling then you’ll get people’s attention AND increase clickthroughs.

Need some help finding the right hero shot? Here’s some tips:

• Use Flickr Advanced Search with the “Only search within Creative Commons” and “Content to use commercially” checkboxes checked.
• Use Google Advanced Image Search with the “Labeled for commercial use” filter turned on to find imagery and photos to use in your blog.

Best Practice #2: Craft a link bait headline

With almost 1,000,000 blog posts created every 24 hours your blog’s headline, along with the hero shot, is what will help you stand out amongst the competition. Make your blog headline not only memorable and keyword focused but also make it link bait. What’s link bait? Basically it’s the stuff that makes people want to share your content. Check out these excellent articles on creating headlines as link bait (that are in themselves link bait) to get started:

• 10 Sure Fire Headline Formulas That Work
• 7 Reasons Why List Posts Will Always Work
• How To Write A Killer How To Post That Gets Attention

Best Practice #3: Lead with ReTweetable copy

When sharing your post on Twitter you should avoid taking the easy road and just tweeting “New blog post: Blog title”. In some cases it’s appropriate but doing so can make your post lost in a sea of Tweets. When posting to Twitter you want to maximize your Tweet’s clickability and ReTweetability (ReTweeting is when someone shares your Tweet with their followers). One way to do this is by taking your blog post and posting it as a question to be answered.

Understand what the pain point of your audience is and how your blog post addresses it. Can you put that into the form of a question? Add that question to your blog headline and you have your Tweet. For example, consider this tweet:

“Check out our new blog post, 10 things to consider when doing BLANK: http://link.to/post”

We can make it more clickable and ReTweetable by changing it to:

“Concerned about doing BLANK? Read 10 things to consider when doing BLANK: http://link.to/post”

Finally, before you make your Tweet ensure that your Tweet is not exactly 140 characters long- you’ll want to leave enough characters for others to ReTweet (ReTweeters add RT @YOURNAME: to the beginning of a ReTweet, so you’ll need at least that many characters to ensure maximum ReTweetability). You can save the most space within your Tweets by employing a URL shortening service like http://j.mp.

By including a hero shot, Link Bait and crafting ReTweetable copy you’ll realize a higher clickthrough rate on your Facebook posts and Tweets. MicroArts employs these techniques ourselves and have experienced positive clickthrough growth as a result. If you need help getting started with social media marketing through blogging for Facebook and Twitter then connect with us today – we’ll help you grow your clickthrough rate too.