As a blogger, your home base website will be your main focus area.
But it’s not just your website that deserves your time and effort. Social media does, too. With some 5.66 billion people using these platforms, having a presence on social media can be a game-changer for expanding your reach and growing your audience.
And it’s not just your audience that’s active on Instagram, TikTok, and the rest.
Brands are too. It’s where they go looking for influencers to work with.
Having a strong social media presence can put you on their radar and help snag those coveted brand deals.
That all sounds good and well, but there’s a catch: with so many social media sites out there, how do bloggers go about ensuring they’re active in the areas that brands are looking? Should bloggers be on all social media platforms?
Join us as we take a deep dive into everything bloggers need to know about using social media in a way that furthers your brand, attracts deals, and keeps burnout at bay.
Understanding Social Media’s Role in Brand Deals
Brands go looking for prospective partners in a number of places, but social media is usually the most common search area.
Having a strong social media presence increases the chances that you’ll pop up on a brand manager’s radar.
What they see while they’re on your profile can determine whether they reach out with a proposal or move on to the next potential brand partner.
See, it’s not just about finding you on social media. They’re looking to see whether you might be the right fit.
If your social media profile has professional, regularly updated content and a strong engagement rate, then it’ll be much more likely that they reach out.
Having those things on any platform is a challenge, but it’s even more difficult when you’re aiming for those things on all the platforms. So, should bloggers be on all social media platforms? Let’s look at the pros and cons.
Pros and Cons of Joining Every Platform
Pros
- Wider Reach: More platforms increases the number of people you can reach.
- More Likely That a Brand Finds You: If you’re on more platforms, it’s easier to pop up on a brand’s radar.
- Platform Diversity Can Offer Protection: Focusing on one platform can land you in trouble if that site loses popularity/you get banned/the algorithm decides it hates you.
Cons
- There Are Only So Many Hours In a Day: Creating content for all the sites requires significant time and energy. Burnout is real.
- An Infrequently Updated Blog Can Cause Damage: A social media account that hasn’t been updated in months (because you prioritised other sites) can look unprofessional.
- You Risk Reduced Engagement: Building an engaged audience takes work. Spreading yourself too thin risks having a somewhat engaged audience across all platforms, rather than a highly engaged audience on just one/two platforms.
Identifying Platforms Where Brands Look
There are hundreds of social media platforms, but brands typically prioritize just two of them: Instagram and TikTok.
If you’re in a visual niche (lifestyle, food, fashion, beauty), then you’ll need to be on at least one of those platforms.
With that said, while Instagram and TikTok dominate influencer marketing, they’re not the only platforms where brands look. Other platforms include:
- Pinterest: For recipes, decor, weddings.
- LinkedIn: Business coaches, professionals, and finance.
- X/Twitter: Tech, gaming, personal finance.
Evaluating Your Audience and Niche
The best way to get the attention of brands is to have an engaged social media audience.
And the best way to get an engaged audience is to exist where your audience spends their time.
You might love TikTok, but if your audience isn’t spending time there, then you’ll be howling into the void.
Brands want partners that have a voice that’s listened to.
It’s possible that you already possess the data that tells you where your audience is. Look at your Google Analytics page; are you getting consistent referrals from one platform above others? Then that’s where your attention should be.
If you don’t have that data, then you can always take the old-fashioned route and simply ask your audience. You’d be surprised at how informative a quick poll can be.
Time Management for Multi-Platform Blogging
Being a blogger can be time-consuming enough without thinking about how you’ll manage to post quality content across multiple social media platforms.
The first step is to be realistic about what you can achieve. If you know that you don’t have time to create and post content for five platforms, then don’t. It’s better to go into depth on one or two platforms, rather than burn yourself out trying to post everywhere.
Setting time aside to create content in batches can help to keep things manageable. Once you’ve got a piece of content, then see about repurposing it for another platform — you usually can with only minimal tweaks.
If you do decide to post across multiple platforms (say, more than three), then social media management software, such as beginner-friendly Buffer or Zoho Social, is recommended.
Building a Sustainable Online Presence
Finding success as a blogger is very much possible, but it takes time. You need to be in it for the long term.
And that can’t happen — not without a lot of unnecessary hardships, anyway — if you’re not growing your brand sustainably.
By that, we mean you’re operating in a replicable way that you can handle month after month.
All too often, bloggers go all in trying to grow their social media presence, only to quickly burnout.
Don’t let that happen to you:
- Put Together A Manageable Posting Routine
- Periodically Review Your Platforms, And Drop The Ones That Aren’t Pulling Their Weight
- Think Big Picture: Building a Successful Blog Is The Priority
Choosing the Right Platforms for Your Blog
By now, we’ve clarified that being everything, everywhere, all at once is a fast-track towards having a diluted social media presence that brands will be all too comfortable bypassing entirely.
But you should absolutely be somewhere on social media.
Choosing the right platform for your blog not only makes it easier to get the attention of the right brands, but also makes the process of creating and posting content more straightforward, too.
Whenever possible, it’s best to focus on platforms that match your strengths. If you’re an excellent writer, then X/Twitter would make sense. If you like being in front of the camera, then TikTok could be the way to go. Instagram is a good option if you like a variety of post types.
Whatever you decide, start small. You might one day have an awesomely powerful presence on all major social media platforms, but that won’t happen on day one. Focus on one platform (or two if you can easily repurpose the content for the other), and commit.
Steps to Attract More Brand Partnerships
OK, by now you should have a firm understanding of why you should be on social media platforms and which one(s) make sense for your blog.
So let’s wrap up by outlining some key steps for increasing the chances of securing those brand partnerships.
- Refine Your Social Media Presence: Brands like relevance as much as they like reach. Refining your social media platforms to be as specific to your niche as possible will lead to greater depth and engagement, which is just what brands look for.
- Include Engagement Metrics in Your Media Kit: Built a loyal audience? You’ll have the metrics to prove it — including them in your media kit so that brands can easily see that you have just what they’re looking for.
- Focus On Consistency: Regular posting is underrated. Brands want to see that you’re active and engaged; it signals confidence.
