Maximize Your Blogs Post on Social Media

I was recently at a meetup and they discussed the importance of an Online Presence. One of the questions asked at the end of the presentation was about “Crossposting” on social media. The presenter gave a great answer but I wanted to expand a bit more on the use of “Meta” tags inside of your website or blog posts. Meta tags are the key to making sure your blog posts look amazing across multiple social media platforms. In this post you will learn a bit about meta tags and why you should take the time to set them up correctly.

Crossposting is the means in which you take a post on a specific platform (e.g Twitter) and you post it on another platform (e.g Facebook). It’s a real easy concept but something that you should take a minute to carefully consider. Why? Well because each platform has it’s own specific “post formats”. The way Facebook displays it’s post is different than Twitter. For example if you are crossposting from Facebook to Twitter you have to consider if your Facebook post exceeds the 200 character limit that Twitter has. Or how about a post from Instagram to Facebook, inside of Intagram hashtags are a good way to curate your posts but they can be cumbersome inside of Facebook.

So why crosspost in the first place? Why not create specific content for each platform? Say you are building a personal brand or running a business. You want your messaging to be clear and consistent on all social media platforms. Or you want to make sure that your posts fit to the audience for each platform. Remember when I mentioned the hashtags on Instagram? Well your Facebook audience may not appreciate seeing all those hashtags.

The basics of crossposting is simple, and is easier if you use a third party service. Services like hootsuite, meetedgar, later, etc., can save you a lot of time. So all you have to do is sign up for one of the many services available, add your accounts and begin posting. Be sure to shop around and find a service that best fits what you are trying to accomplish with your marketing strategy.

While third party services can help with “auto-posting”, for you. They don’t take care of making sure all your post look great on all social media platforms. This is where you have to do a bit more work to get your post looking great on all platforms. If you have a WordPress site then your job just got easier. Try using plugins like Yoast to help you out. But if you have a simple website or are on another CMS make sure you tweak your meta tags.

Here’s an example of my meta tags on my site.

As you can see meta tags literally begin with “meta”. There are bits of html code that give social media sites information they will need to properly format a post for you. Each social media platform has it’s own set of rules for meta tags. So be sure to check each platforms developer documentation regarding meta tags.

Here’s a basic example of how meta tags work for Twitter inside of one my blog posts.

<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />
<meta name="twitter:description" content="Emacs is great for many reasons but it can be a 3 headed monster when it comes to configuring it. I recently ran into a interesting error when I was syncronizing my Org files in Syncthing." />
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Working Emacs Lock Files and Syncthing - Eduardo Robles Web &amp; Technology Consulting" />
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@mreduardorobles" />
<meta name="twitter:image" content="https://erwtc.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/code-erwtc-blog_1920x1080.jpg" />
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@mreduardorobles" />

The meta tags simply describe the basic components of what a tweet will encompass. Here’s what it looks like in a tweet.

Looks great doesn’t it? So if you take the time to setup meta tags for your social media platforms you can save so much time and your blogs post will look great as posts on social media platforms.

I hope that you understand how important meta tags can be for social media marketing. But most importantly how much time they can save you when you crosspost. They are also extremely helpful for SEO purposes! Which is why you should take the time to set them up correctly on your site. And consider adding them to your blog posts so they look good when a reader shares your posts.

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