Another question that comes up often from the bloggers and businesses that I talk to is whether they can promote a blog post from their smartphone. Perhaps, like many of us, they write and schedule the blog post in advance, setting it up to publish at the best time of day. But they might be busy with their normal activities at that time, or away from their office.
If the blog post has all of the correct meta tags set up (which it should anyways), and you have mobile friendly social sharing icons on your blog post, you can proceed to tap those icons and go through your normal routine of sharing the post to social media.
But should you?
What will be missing?
Convenience of a desktop keyboard, for one. Will you be as thoughtful and thorough in your introduction as you would if you weren’t constrained by the tiny tapping QWERTY keyboard on your smartphone?
Do the social sharing icons function in the same way on mobile? Is the experience and usability diminished?
Are you missing bookmarklets and bookmarks that you would normally utilize?
How will you proceed through the rest of the checklist for How To Promote A Blog Post For Maximum Visibility? These are some of the most important aspects.
Email Promotion
While MailChimp’s app does not support the creation of new campaigns, there are some workarounds. An easy option would be to set up an automatic RSS newsletter so that every time you publish a new blog post, MailChimp automatically notifies your list. Or, alternatively, you can use the unique email address provided by MailChimp upon list creation to email copy for a new campaign. MailChimp will save it as a Draft and you can use the MailChimp app to review and send. Or you could simply use the full MailChimp.com website from your mobile browser.
Branded Social Media
What about your other social accounts? If you normally use a tool like Hootsuite to share to social, particularly additional accounts (like I do for my branded social profiles), you might be able to accomplish that from mobile, though Google+ isn’t supported. The mobile Buffer app though has you covered there, so that’s still plausible.
Triberr & Reciprocal Sharing
While Triberr does not have a mobile app, you certainly could use the web version in your mobile web browser to make sure your post was imported, and even pay to promote it. The same is true for JustRetweet, ViralWoot, and other sites you might use. All of which though will likely prove more challenging on a mobile device.
And on and on…
Of course, if you’re in a pinch, promoting a new blog post via mobile is better than not at all. I shared a story once about the time I tried to schedule a blog post to publish and get it shared while I was traveling, and the tech troubles that ensued. But given the situation, it was still better to get the post out and that initial traffic and interest going, to an extent.
But for most posts, I think it’s clear you need to coordinate publishing and scheduling so that you or someone responsible is available to go through all of the promotion steps needed, from a laptop or desktop computer, and make sure that new post is promoted the right way.
If you haven’t already, be sure to download the complete Blog Promotion Checklist for reference. And if you’re wondering whether you can have your new blog posts promoted automatically, be sure to read the previous article!
Can You Promote A Blog Post Automatically