Social Media Report: Pinning Pros

To promote my blog, Pinning Pros, which discusses the ins and outs of the new popular social media site Pinterest, I used several social media tools. By using social media, my goal was to promote my blog and gain readership. Some attempts to publicize my blog through social media were successful, and some were less successful. Overall, though, I feel my blog benefited from my use of social media.

The first thing I did was to go into the settings on WordPress and allow it to publish to my Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr and Google Plus. By doing this, it placed small icons for each of these sites at the bottom of each of my blog posts. This way if someone was reading my blog and they wanted to share it on a social networking site, they easily could. This also enabled WordPress to automatically post my new blog posts to my Facebook profile, so my friends could see my entries.

After connecting with Facebook, I had the idea to even put some blogs I was really proud of in status updates. In these statuses, I included the link to the blog post, a brief description of the post and urged my friends to read it. These status updates definitely helped my friends know about my blog. I received several “likes” on these statuses and even a few comments. I also posted about my blog on the other social networking sites, like Twitter.

The stats for my blog site show how many views my blog has had. Overall, my blog has had 50 views, according to the stats on WordPress. The number of views on my busiest day was 11. Today, alone, I received 4 views. I also began to receive comments from strangers on my posts, which lets me know that my blog is out there for people to see and read. There is no question that the number of views I receive has increased since I started the blog and began to promote it through social media. This shows the positive effect social media has had on my blog.

I think for my first blogging attempt, social media helped others read the thoughts I was publishing. While I do not have an overwhelming following or a staggering number of views, I know I wouldn’t have had as many as I did without using these social media sites. I feel that if I were to continue to use social media to promote my blog, eventually my blog would become widely read.