Creating a blog can bring quite a bit of buzz and exposure to your business. However, if it is not appropriately marketed, the blog could results in wasted hours with little or no results. In order to reap the most out of your blog and work, it’s important to ensure your blog is integrated into social media so you are able to gain readership and expand your exposure.
Here are some actions you can take to help implement your blog into social media so you can increase your reach immediately.
Understand how your business will benefit from the blog
Before you can successfully launch your blog, you will need to understand your blogging goals. Specifically, you will want to determine who you are trying to reach and why. After you’ve determined your target market, you will be able to select the appropriate social media platform to pair with your blog.
Get to know the available platforms
Popular social media platforms include Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are heavily used by consumers but are also utilized by many businesses; LinkedIn is traditionally utilized by professionals and businesses.
Determine who will manage the blog and social media
Determine if this is a task that you will take on or if it’s someone else who is associated with your company. If it’s you, and you have limited experience with social media, you may want to get assistance from an employee (or even a friend) who has spent a considerable amount of time within the selected social media platforms. They will be able to supply you with hints and tricks that will help you save time and increase your effectiveness.
Be strategic
Create a documented plan for your social media strategy. This will help you stay on-task so you can meet your business goals. There are so many features available through blogging and social media platforms that it can be easy to stray away from your original purpose.
When creating your strategy, consider what content you plan to utilize, how you plan to engage your readers and potential readers, frequency of your activity, and how you plan to respond to comments and questions.
Choose your tactics
Once your strategy is determined, it’s time to think up and try out your tactics. Your tactics may include:
- Taking advantage of social media sharing features in your blogging platform (many provide readers the ability to share your posts with those they are connected with through the top social media platforms)
- Creating a Facebook page and/or Twitter account for your blog and your company
- Producing videos that you publish on YouTube and link to your blog
- Hosting giveaways with the winner determined by a point system where readers earn points for becoming a fan of your Facebook page, sharing your blog, Tweeting about your company, etc.
Measure, measure, measure
Many businesses fail to measure their blogging and social media activities. This is a huge fail point. If you don’t measure your tactics, you will have no way of knowing if the hours you’re logging on your blog and social media efforts are paying off. This can be more costly than paying only the minimum balance on your credit card. After all, time is money and if you’re investing your time in social media, you need to ensure that it’s time well spent.
One way to measure the success of your blog and its integration into social media is the number of hits to your website. No matter which blog platform you choose, you should be able to access readership statistics.
These stats often break down to daily, weekly, monthly and annual visits according to post. You can also measure success by the number of followers you have on the various social media platforms you’re utilizing and the participation in giveaways and other contests.
When measuring the success of any blog or marketing activity, you should try to tie it back to financials. One way to do this with social media is to survey clients at the end of each sale. Ask them how they learned about your business and what motivated them to purchase your products/services. If they mention your blog and other social media in their response, you can attribute that sale to the efforts you have been making in this area.
This is a guest post by Charles, check out the guide line to guest post
Image Credit: 7iber dot com
11 comments
Measure, measure, measure is right! Everything you do can probably be a lot more efficient if you were to measure its’ effectiveness. I’ve done this with everything from time on twitter to comments on specific blogs. I’ve found tons of ways to save some time and increase traffic at the same time!
I can’t help but second your comment Graham. Measuring the results of one’s actions is what will give the directions where the social media strategy will really go. In any case return on investment can only be calculated through measurement. This has been improved with the new tracking possibilities given by tools such as Google Analytics or GetClicky.
Just to avoid the title confusion, I thought blogs themselves are a type of social media? You think so??
To me blogs are not part of social media per se. Social media involves interaction through different channels, many people interacting on many subjects at the same time. On a blog (and this is changing with “guest blogging”) it is more of a 1 way channel. An author posts something and people comment to that and interact on that.
The line is unclear concerning this, but this is my view of the question.
I am finding that the most successful social media users are also the most creative in coming up with new ways in getting things to become viral! You have to have that creative edge to get a good social response, as well as planning and the other excellent points you made above. Great post!
Yes, being creative and “linkbaiting” is important. There are so many competing elements trying to vie for your audience’s attention.
Do you have any tips on creative ways to becoming viral? I would love to hear them!
Great post from Charles.
However it always seems a lot easier reading these posts than actually getting the results mentioned in the post.
I have been working aimlessly in trying to get my blog to drive traffic to my business through Social Media, but as of yet have not been that successful.
Blogging and social media are linked together . They are created to integrate..
Blogs and social media are inter connected with each other, because effective promotion work can be done through this.
Hi, Charles!
Very well explained, every one talks about blog for business but very few talk about its importance and exposure, this is same as use of social for a blog but for a business blog it would be more awesome if we write about things that our clients are looking for.
thanks a lot.
Great article on how to use social networking tools on the internet to market your business. I am currently using some of these strategies to help market my company, to gain online presence. Thanks for sharing.