≡ Menu

How To Use Social Networks To Expand Your Travel Blog

networkingConnecting with other travelers is essential if you want to expand your travel blog. Social networks give you the opportunity to get in touch with readers outside of your blog comments and as they (and hopefully you) are actively traveling. This article isn’t about any particular social network (if you’re interested in that check out the social networks every travel blogger should be using) but rather how to be someone worth connecting with.

You need to provide useful, topical, and some personal information to increase your online presence through social networks to directly and indirectly benefit your travel blog.

Establish Your Persona

Maintain the same identity across all of the social networks you belong to. Have the same name, similar profile pictures, and same voice across all of them. This helps to establish your personality with other travelers and across the Internet. Your personality is closely tied to your travel blog – that’s the reason people will continue to follow you.

People become attached to things they can identify with and social networks are where you can let your personality shine. Social networks are where you can show off a side of you that’s a bit more fun and real than you would on your travel blog.

Have A Purpose

Just like your travel blog needs direction, so do your social networking accounts. Travel bloggers need to Tweet, update their Facebook statuses, and Stumble generally travel-related material. Don’t let your social networks be the place where you rant about random events all the time or put vague messages like “blah today”.

Social networks are an extension of your travel blog and as such you need to stay on topic when possible. It’s important to not only maintain your identity across all of your social networking account but between your social network profiles and your travel blog. Think before you post and try to make everything count.

Make Them Part of Your Blogging Schedule

Hopefully you’ve established a travel blogging schedule for yourself and your posts. As soon as you join any social network however, you need to make time for it as well. Consider posting to your social networks as another regular blogging task. Update them on a consistent basis and don’t neglect any of the accounts you set up. Try and see what social networks work for you and get rid of the accounts that don’t.

If you’re constantly creating new profiles on different social networks but never updating them you’ll eventually lose the faith of your readers and the people that follow you there. It’s vital to establish some sort of flexible routine and some basic goals like ‘at least 2 tweets a day’.

Be Positive

Don’t trash talk anyone and rather than post negative things help highlight many of the good things that are going on in the travel industry, your travel blog, and in your personal life (that’s travel-related of course). Controversy is good to foster in your travel blog posts from time to time but you want to connect with other potential readers through the various social networks. The golden rule applies, if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say it.

Remember that it goes both ways – be positive about others and they won’t write bad things about you.

Connect, Don’t Over-Promote

While it’s important to establish a strong identity and inject your personality into your social networking presence don’t get consumed by yourself. Don’t always write about yourself – there are other people on those social networks who you should be connecting with. Don’t get obsessed with drawing hits to your travel blog. It may work at first to bombard people with links to your latest posts but to increase your credibility online you need others to promote your material in the long run.

Promote and talk about all of the great things that other travel bloggers are posting and writing about. Not only will they reciprocate but you’ll ultimately be helping your own travel blog by getting new ideas, finding out what your peers are writing about, and understanding that you aren’t the only travel blogger out there.

Basics Not To Forget

  • Make it easy to contact you and reply to every personal message.
  • Have a link to your travel blog – almost all social networking tools have a place for urls.
  • Include a profile picture. The default picture won’t cut it and shows that you’re not serious about being social.

Take Your Time

Everything worth doing with your travel blog takes times and social networks are no different. Posting a flurry of updates only to realize your blog page views haven’t tripled and you don’t have a thousand followers shouldn’t discourage you and cause you to give up. In fact that’s the worst thing that you can do. Much like your travel blog people want to see that you’re in it for the long haul.

It will take time for people to see that you’re posting useful travel related material, talking about your peers, while getting to know a bit more about you at the same time. Plant the seeds of your travel blog in a few good places, be patient and persistent, and connect with as many like-minded people as you can and you’ll expand your travel blog for years to come.

[photo by: luc legay]

{ 17 comments… add one }
  • Travel Australia March 22, 2010, 03:16

    You are right, Anil Social network is the essential tool for the travel blog. Through social networking you spread your experiences via you travel blog. Make an identity is a big part for sharing your thoughts over the internet.

    • Anil P. March 22, 2010, 07:37

      An identity is very important especially for single author blogs.

  • Lucy Soriano Lapierre November 18, 2011, 00:58

    Thanks for this useful information.. I like your blog(s) and how you teach new bloggers to expand our communication with integral tips on social networks.. keep it up!

  • Robert November 21, 2011, 17:32

    Some good advice, thanks.
    It’s definitely a work in progress!

    • Anil P. November 22, 2011, 07:41

      Definitely so, you must be patient and genuine.

  • Izy Berry May 23, 2012, 21:03

    Thanks so much for this awesome post – I love this entire site actually. I’ve just started my blog and I wanna build things up before I even think about monetizing it, but it’s good to have all these things brewing in the back of my mind. Ah, my dream is to be able to travel perpetually like you do… one day soon I hope 😉

    • Anil P. May 24, 2012, 06:09

      Thanks Izy! Let me know if you have any specific topics you’d like me to cover here and good luck on your dreams! I hope you accomplish them one day…soon too 🙂

      (Also, I just tweeted your stabbing story, very interesting read and glad the damage done was minor.)

  • Find Cottage Holidays September 19, 2012, 13:56

    Interesting article. Do you have a view on whether when interacting with other blogs you should use your website identity (such as our Find Cottage Holidays) or create a separate one with a name (such as Anil) ? I normally write everything in my blog name but sometimes this seems to cause some blog owners a problem.

    • Anil P. September 20, 2012, 06:40

      Definitely use your name, your comments otherwise look suspiciously like spam. In fact, I almost didn’t approve your comment just for that reason.

      • Stuart September 20, 2012, 06:44

        Thanks, I will go under my name then!

  • angelatravels May 21, 2013, 18:33

    Great advise. Thank you for the tips. I will be playing around with my different social media accounts as much as possible.

  • Christine October 31, 2013, 21:08

    Hi Anil,

    Great advice here. I was just wondering whether travel bloggers tend to use just one social media account for both their blogging and personal life? I have a lifestyle blog and I have a separate twitter account for that, so I am wondering is that something travel bloggers do as well?

    • Anil Polat November 4, 2013, 06:26

      Hi Christine,

      It really depends on the blogger but generally Facebook, it’s personal profile and page; Twitter most people tend to merge, and same for Instagram. Usually for single author blogs most people stick with using a single Twitter and other social media accounts. They’re easier to manage and gives you a side outlet to have another voice that might not be feasible in blog format.

  • April Hope November 1, 2016, 10:52

    Thank you so much! I was wondering, if I write a blog post about how well known bloggers monetize their blogs and want to use a tip or quote from each blogger, should I first contact every one to ask permission before writing it? Or is it alright for me to send each person a copy of the final draft before publishing as a courtesy to let them know? I will put a link to the original source for each tip or quote in the post. Thank you!

    • Anil Polat November 1, 2016, 17:52

      For original content, it’s best to get in touch with them directly. Though generally, you want to get on their blogs, not the other way around.

Leave a Comment