How to Promote Your Blog on Snapchat
You spend hours researching, writing, and editing the posts for your blog, and even more hours finding the right images to publish alongside them.
Running a blog is definitely a labor of love, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want other people to find and appreciate the blog posts you put all that time into.
Every blogger will need to figure out for themselves what the right promotion tactics are for you and your audience. One that’s definitely worth considering is using Snapchat to promote your blog and connect with your audience.
Why Choose Snapchat to Promote Your Blog?
Snapchat has 173 million daily users. Most of them are in the 18-24 age range and they use the app frequently – opening it over 20 times a day and spending more than 30 minutes on it. If your blog’s target audience includes people in that age range, then Snapchat is a valuable tool for reaching them where they are.
Here are a few specific ways you can start leveraging Snapchat to promote your blog.
1. Promote your posts.
Snapchat is primarily a visual platform, so in order to do this you need to start with a related image or video. You can use an image or video included in your blog post, or you could create a short video to share that introduces the blog post.
Whichever route you choose, use the Paperclip tool to include a link to the blog post itself. Users will easily be able to access the post by swiping up and viewing it in the Snapchat browser.
If you do this each time you publish a new blog post, you can start to bring your content to a new audience. Experiment with the types of images and videos that get the most people to swipe up to access your blog.
2. Share photos of you at work and in life.
One of the biggest benefits of social media is that it allows for a more direct connection between creators and consumers. Your blog audience will appreciate having a chance to see who you are behind the scenes.
Have a friend or partner take photos of you while you’re hard at work, as well when you’re pursuing hobbies or otherwise living your life.
And definitely share any photos that relate to the focus of your blog. If it’s a fashion blog, Snaps that have unboxing videos when you get a new package of clothes in the mail or photos of you wearing a new outfit are a great idea. For a gardening blog, photos of your plants or the food you made with veggies you grew yourself would make great Snaps.
Sharing these images on Snapchat will humanize you more for your audience, show your personality, and help them feel more connected to you.
3. Create original Snap content.
You want some of your Snaps to help lead people back to your blog (that is the ultimate goal), but you want to give people a reason to keep following you on Snapchat as well.
To incentivize people to follow you on the platform to begin with and stick around once they do, provide exclusive content that people can only view on Snapchat. This could include video demos that relate to the topics you cover on your blog, or behind-the-scenes photos that you don’t share anywhere else.
Turn to past blog posts to help with ideas. You can repurpose the content you already have to create something new – a section of an old blog post can become a helpful short video for your Snapchat followers, for instance.
Even if it’s similar to old content, offering something new and unique to your Snapchat audience will show you value your connection with them on the platform.
4. Use Snap to promote your email list.
Building an email list is one of the best ways you have to stay connected to your audience and encourage them to keep coming back.
Use Snapchat to promote your email list and get more sign ups, then use your email list to promote your blog to the Snapchat followers that opted in. It gives you one more way to stay connected to the community and get more eyes on your blog posts.
5. Connect with others.
As with any social media network, for Snapchat to really pay off you have to be social. That means you can’t just push out your own message and promotions, you have to spend time actually connecting and interacting with others on the platform.
Spend some time researching other bloggers on the platform that cover topics related to yours and try to find people in your target audience to connect with. Chat with the people you connect with and comment on photos and videos they share. Building personal connections is the whole point of social media and a necessary step in getting people to care about your blog – they’ll care a lot more about you and what you have to say when they see that you’re willing to make a genuine connection with them.
Use Snapchat to Connect With Your Readers
Snapchat shouldn’t be treated as simply a promotional platform – that approach never really works on social media.
Use it as a way to connect with other people and start to grow your community. But in the midst of doing that, you can also promote your blog and gain some new readers and followers.
Kristen Hicks is an Austin-based freelance content writer and lifelong learner with an ongoing curiosity to learn new things. She uses that curiosity, combined with her experience as a freelance business owner, to write about subjects valuable to small business owners on the HostGator blog. You can find her on Twitter at @atxcopywriter.