The Best Time to Share Your Blog Posts on Social Media (Syndication)

You click the publish button, and your latest blog post is now live. It’s a pretty good one, containing an original image, a great title and many of best practices contained in Cuppa SEO’s Blogging 101 E-book.

If you’re like most people, the next logical step is to publish your new blog post on all of your social media channels, which is a good idea for sure.

But wait — don’t be so hasty to syndicate that blog post!

Why You Should Wait before Sharing Your Blog Post on Social Media

Most people don’t know this, but sharing your blog post on social media too fast can actually be bad for your blog and the website it’s attached to. This is only true if you’re publishing the entire blog post on a platform like LinkedIn’s “Publish a Post” feature, or something similar. Here’s why …

When you post new content to your blog, or your website for that matter, it can take Google days (sometimes a couple of weeks) to index the post or page. Essentially, indexing means that Google and other search engines have discovered your new content and now see it as part of your blog or website. In other words, it get’s a “received” stamp from the search engines.

With social media, it’s a different story.

When you publish the full blog post (along with a link back to your blog of course) on social media channels, the search engines index this pretty quickly. Since it’s social media, it’s more time sensitive (at least in theory), so the search engines go out of their way to make sure each shared posting on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and the like, are indexed fast.

How this Can Hurt Your Blog’s Authority

When Google indexes your social media posts before indexing your actual blog post, an odd thing can happen. The social media postings are perceived as original content, while the blog post is perceived as duplicate content.

When this happens, there’s a possibility that Google will give less credit (authority) to the blog post, which in turn can negatively affect the SEO value of the blog post in question — as well as the SEO value of your entire blog and website.

I’ve seen websites with active blogs being pinged for dozens or hundreds of pages that are being seen as “duplicate content,” even though they’ve broken no actual rules. Common sense would dictate that we publicize our efforts ASAP, but in reality we should be doing the exact opposite.

The Solution

The good news is that it’s pretty easy to get your social media efforts in line with supporting your blog and website. The simplest solution is to post snippets of a post, or write a completely new “mini-description” to engage with readers. As long as you’re not cutting and pasting your entire article into a social media platform, you should be OK.

If you are publicizing the entire article on social, begin sharing (syndicating) your blog posts about two weeks after you actually publish them. To do this, you can use a third party app like Hootsuite or Sendible to schedule your postings, or if you prefer to post them all yourself just make a note on your social media calendar as to when you can share each new blog post.

In the meantime, you don’t want your social media communications to disappear, right?

That’s why I suggest going back to some of your older blog posts and sharing one specific tidbit from each of them on your social platforms — again, providing a link to the entire post. It’s OK to recycle content multiple times, as long as it’s still relevant and helpful. You might even want to start a discussion around a blog post topic to engage with your audience!

Thank you for visiting Cuppa SEO. If you found this blog post on social media, I guess that means it’s been at least 2-weeks since I published it …