There’s no doubt that blogging is a powerful marketing tool. Companies and small business owners who have been using this method can attest to its effectiveness. In fact, this online tool is also helpful in improving an organization’s marketing efforts on social media platforms. And with a strategy combining blogging and social media, a company or any business owner for that matter can be sure to reap the rewards moving forward. One way to maximize the potential of your blog is to share every blog post on social media. On Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter, you can share the link to your post. Experts recommend not to do a hard sell kind of status update on the social networking sites. If people see that the post looks like a sales page, they tend to move to another site and not read through what you’ve written. An ideal way to share a blog post on social media is to make your status update 80 percent informative and 20 percent self-promotional. This is a better way to encourage readers to click on your link and bring them to your blog particularly when they see the first part of the post as interesting to read. If they find the post valuable, they will likely read other articles on the blog and find out more about the author or publisher. When sharing your blog post, make sure that the image included in your article is also being displayed. Research has shown that a post with photo normally gets more engagement on social media compared to those that provides only a link. Also, you can mention certain people or businesses in your status updates particularly those you include in the blog post. You can use the hashtag on Twitter and tag them in your Facebook update. Fortunately, there is now a way to schedule posts on social media sites. This will enable you to share status updates several times in a day without having to log in to your account every time. Facebook allows this but if you want to use only one site to automate your posts, Hootsuite is a popular site to use. Photo via smashinghub