Cross Platform Promotion and how your blog can utilize it!

CPP, or Cross Platform Promotion, a term coined by Sarah Jayne Gratton, and her husband, Dean in their book, Zero to 100,000 : Social Media tips for Small Businesses emphasizes on the need to utilize multiple social media platforms in order to ensure maximum exposure for your content.

Driving traffic to your blog through Cross Platform Promotion involves understanding the audiences that exist on the multiple social media platforms available to us today, and crafting a suitable message as per audience personalities. For example, a minimal and concise message is what works best with Twitter due to their character limitations, whereas pictures perform well on Facebook and Pinterest. Also, a professional tone is encouraged on LinkedIn, and hashtags can work wonders for your blog if well used on Instagram.

Let us learn how you can leverage Cross Platform Promotion with the help of suitable examples of how prominent Indian bloggers successfully directed traffic to their blogs with the help of astutely devised Cross Platform Promotion strategies.

Twitter

Happened to meet a guy in Mumbai who grew up on the streets, wrote his book and started his own cafe!

His story: https://t.co/oXZnNF3zon

— Shivya Nath (@shivya) May 6, 2017

Travel Blogger Shivya Nath who owns the blog, The Shooting Star, regularly shares her stories and write-ups with her Twitter followers. She has 22.2k of them, so you can only imagine the amount of traffic she generates through CPP on Twitter.

Here’s how you can do it too.

Assuming you have a modest Twitter following of a few hundred followers, but wish to grow and make sure your work reaches Twitter users from all over the world. The first step lies within understanding how content discovery works on Twitter. The first platform to introduce hashtags as a form of searchable keywords, the key to effective Twitter communication is the platform’s minimalist approach of allowing just 140 characters per Tweet.

Images make your Tweet stand out, so make sure your post is accompanied by a catchy yet relevant image. The average lifespan of a Tweet is relatively too short at 18 minutes, although you can post a similar tweet upto four times a day, alternating between fresh posts and reposts.

Facebook

There are no character restrictions on Facebook as opposed to Twitter, and that allows you to be more specific and descriptive, although if your text copy is too long, it may drop off a Facebook user’s attention span therefore it is advised to keep your copy crisp and to the point.

Images once again help attract attention of a user when he/she is scrolling through their timeline. You can add the link to your story, or blog post in the text field, which allows you to use a fresh yet relevant image.

Photographer Naina Redhu shares her experience of photographing the Rashtrapati Bhavan with a beautiful picture of the building with a link to her blog.

Facebook posts simplify interaction with Comments and Replies which enable you to talk to your audience so don’t ignore the possibility of igniting a conversation by asking your followers a question, or asking them for their opinion.

Facebook users are a well mixed up batch of all age groups therefore a copy with a wider, more generic appeal is suitable for the world’s largest social network.

To know the best time to post on various social media platforms, refer to this Infographic.

Instagram

The picture sharing based platform does not allow links to accompany your images, although it does allow you to post a link in your bio. Being another hashtag discovery driven platform, Instagram can help you reach out to younger audiences through visual appeal and effective use of suitable hashtags.

The lifespan of Instagram posts too is shorter as compared to its counterpart in the photo sharing department, Pinterest, therefore always treat Instagram posts as such and keep the message short, with hashtags in the lower half of your caption.

Food and Travel Blogger, Kalyan Karmakar owns The Finely Chopped and regularly shares his culinary escapades with his Instagram followers with a link to his blog in his Instagram bio.

A perfect fit for travel bloggers, photographers, or lifestyle blogs, Instagram banks on aesthetics and can work wonders for your Cross Platform Promotion strategy.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn like Facebook, allows users to post through their accounts with text upto 600 characters long, although any text post longer than 150 characters would require your users to click ‘See More’ to read further.

You can also repost your stories on LinkedIn Pulse or on SlideShare to reach even more LinkedIn members if your content is business related.

It is advisable to repost the same content once a week to garner maximum reach, and gradually reducing it to 2-3 months.

Karen Gross, one of LinkedIn’s top listed writers in 2015, is also a contributor for many publications. She has more than 57 thousand followers on LinkedIn where she has shared 244 articles.

Pinterest

Pinterest allows users to categorize and segregate Pins, and is a visually driven platform like Instagram. Users can describe or write a caption upto 500 characters long on a Pin. You can use keywords in the form of searchable hashtags in order to simplify content discovery.

A link can be added into the caption in order to redirect your audience to your blog. Sharing and resharing on Pinterest has an important advantage, in the form of target audience. Lifestyle, Travel, DIY, Food and Décor bloggers prefer Pinterest and so do enthusiasts of the aforementioned categories.

Mainly comprising of female users, Pinterest offers a visual translation for you to attract more readers to your blog.

This is how you can successfully leverage Cross Platform Promotion in order to drive traffic to your blog, and grow.