If you want to be a successful blogger, you must master how to communicate with other bloggers across social media channels.

Grasping the behavioral patterns of other popular bloggers and aspiring bloggers can play a key role in having meaningful engagement with your followers on social media.

There are many rewards to engaging with other bloggers on social media.

Social Media Benefits for Bloggers

First, it puts you to a position to learn from your peers – I personally follow superb bloggers such as Viper Chill who interact with their followers to share new ideas from time to time.

Consider this recent Facebook post before the launch of Gaps.

By making your followers a part of your brainstorming you are telling them that you value their presence and engagement. It’s also the most natural way to promote your product even before it’s launched.

Secondly, and most obviously, social media engagement helps you gain more followers. The social media spectrum has become more crowded and competitive than ever, with the more and more bloggers joining the social web. Therefore, meaningful and creative engagement is the most potent tool that can help you stand apart from others.

With more engaging and useful posts for your followers, you’re likely to see a boost in organic engagement and growth in follower counts. This is particularly vital as social media channels such as Facebook have tweaked their algorithm, making organic reach more challenging for page owners.

SocialFlow_FacebookOrganicReach — Source: Marketing Land

Third, having a meaningful dialogue with your followers is the most natural way of establishing yourself as a thought leader. The mentioning of thought leadership instantly conjures up one of the most accomplished content marketers of our time – Rand Fishkin. With unparalleled transparency and tireless engagement on Twitter, the Moz founder generates a great deal traction on Twitter.

Best way to sell something – don’t sell anything. Earn the awareness, respect, & trust of those who might buy.

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) February 4, 2015

While your blog is the most appropriate place for research-driven and insightful pieces of content, social media platforms still allow you to share your knowledge in short posts on the fly. In fact, these concise social media posts and comprehensive blog posts complement one another so well that you can’t afford to focus on one aspect at the cost of another.

How to Engage with Your Social Media Audience

Developing meaningful engagement with your audience comes with persistence and experience. It can be really frustrating at first, but equally rewarding in the long run. If you’re a newbie in the social media sphere, the following tips may help you grow your skills and confidence to help you take your engagement to the next level.

Keep it Real:

Being honest and keeping it real is the most important component of connecting with your loyal fan base. As Seth Godin said in one of his interviews, having a massive fan base on social media is useless unless there was a deep connection between the brand and its followers.

In fact, it’s better to have massive engagement with a relatively smaller fan base rather than little engagement with a huge number of followers. Let each and every social media post reflect your honesty and entice your followers to engage with you. At the end of the day, you want them to be your brand advocate and not just a part of your vanity fan count.

Acknowledge:

When the number of followers is small, it’s easy to engage with them on a regular basis. However, if you’re followed by a huge number of fans, it can be really challenging (and almost impossible) to acknowledge each and every response in your thread. However, as a blogger, the more people you engage with personally, the better. What’s even more challenging is being able to respect their views even when you don’t agree with them. Don’t censor your followers unless it’s a personal attack or insult to other participants.

Indeed, being able to engage with your followers honestly is half the battle.

Use Tools:

If you’re posting across multiple social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn multiple times a day, it can be very time-consuming. Also, it can be very challenging to strike a balance between attending to your fans and focusing on your core activities, i.e. blogging.

The solution lies in using tools to schedule and monitor your posts across social media channels.

Social media tools such as Buffer, IFTTT, Commun.it, and Hootsuite have proven benefits and are a must-have. However, before you choose your tools, consider your audience and your social media goals What works for one niche may not work for another.

Final Thoughts

As a blogger, you must demonstrate empathy and improve your understanding of your target audience across social media. With persistent engagement and the right toolset, you can boost your fan base and achieve your blogging goals.

What are some of the important social media lessons you have learned over the years? Please, share with us in the comments below.

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About the Author

Susanta Sahoo is founder and chief content marketing strategist at Top League Technologies, a digital marketing start-up in Bhubaneswar, India. By offering SEO consulting services, he helps SMB’s build their online presence and boost ROI. Follow him on Twitter:@sushantsahoo