Blogging as a Powerful Social Media Promotion Tool
Blogging for Promotion. Image Source: flickr.com
Nowadays any serious company aimed at constant growth and concerned with its reputation is being actively promoted in social media. B2C relations and behavior models have changed, so now the companies do not just inform their users – they communicate with them, expecting feedbacks, alternatives, suggestions, etc. Those relations become more and more bilateral; therefore it is very important to work out a social media strategy.
First of all, a company should use social media as a mean of communication with its customers. It is very important, since the more customers share their ideas and suggestions, the better the service will be. Another point is inter-customer communication which is important for community building. Finally, building brand advocates around a company will definitely attract those, who may become customers later.
Social media strategy usually involves constant and active communication with customers within social networks. Twitter and Facebook are the most popular ones. Another means are newsletter delivery and launch of the corporate forum on community building purposes. Additionally, if a company sells some goods, the social media marketers may create a dedicated YouTube channel to release videos with their products commercials, tests and how-to’s, etc.
Today we are going to talk specifically about blogging as a means of social media promotion.
Start your own blog
Start Your Own Blog. Image Source: kimandscotts.wordpress.com
A corporate blog is one of the most powerful communication channels. Such blogs are used in order to create some buzz around the company. Those blogs gather and share information related to business they are doing and serves as a company newsfeed. Corporate blogs may be not very strict and official as we are all human and their authors are trying to tell that, posting some funny articles or releasing reports from the latest party. This works quite well for relationship building. However, the main objective of the corporate blogger is to make the blog interesting and attractive for business people. Interesting ideas are supposed to improve brand loyalty and bring in new customers or partners.
Thus, if your company has its website, you need to have a blog started under it. Share your news and ideas, post your views and receive comments to them – all this will increase the interest in your project. In order to speak and to be heard, and to gain interest of not only your current customers but also of the occasional visitors, you need to get blogging software and install it. The most recommended free blogging software is WordPress, as it has plenty of useful options and can be enhanced with numerous plug-ins. You can get WordPress installation here.
Take Care of the Content
Once you set up your own blog, you need to fill it with content and constantly update it. The thing you need to keep in mind is that the content needs to be of good quality, so it is better to publish a limited number of unique well-written posts, rather than posting low-quality content in bulk. A blog mostly needs to be updated by a social media person; however, the involvement of the entire team of the project would be very useful, as far as different people have expertise in different fields and some knowledge to share. As mentioned above, a blog shouldn’t be too official, so apart from publishing company news and reviews, press-releases and research reports you may also put some fun into it.
Have Your Blog Linked
Get it Linked! Image Source: flickr.com
If you want your blog to bring more traffic and more people, interested in your services or products, you need to obtain external links. Those can bring customers to your website or your Twitter or Facebook corporate account, whatever – but they need to work. Inter-linking – provision of internal links is essential, too. Say, someone finds a certain article from your blog on Google. He or she follows it, but once they finish with reading, they usually don’t browse along the entire blog – no “Home” or “Older Entries” clicks are made, so the page per visit rate stays at “1”. You may improve this situation by linking some of the keywords to other articles on the topic, you have published.
Guest Blogging
Guest Blogging. Image Source: flickr.com
Having a corporate blog helps to forward its visitors to your company site. Of course, you will ask how to get traffic to your blog! Here is the solution – you need to find some blogs, accepting guest posts and which content would be relevant to your service and business you run. Then you can start posting articles there and getting them back-linked to your blog or to your website directly. Those posts help you establishing yourself as an expert in a certain niche and a guest blog owner get quality content to his or her blog for free. Of course, those posts should be quality as well, so it is advisable to get familiarized with post submission conditions and accepted topics at every certain website. If you want your blog to become popular – mark guest blogging as another objective in your social media marketing plan.
Summary
Blogging becomes more and more popular. A well-organized, frequently updated blog with wide targeted audience can become a very powerful social media tool. Whatever your company deals with, you should anyway have something to say – so say it! Be active and self-confident and make the others feel, you are. Share your experience, thoughts, and ideas and see people leaving comments on the matter, discussing them and involving other people into it. This is the way social media marketing works.
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