If you manage social media for a small business, you’ve probably wondered where you should spend the bulk of your social media time. Twitter? Facebook? Pinterest?
The answer: none of the above. Stop spending hours out of your week on Twitter and Facebook, and instead spend more time developing content. You’ll start to realize that when you create quality content–meaning blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, etc.–social media will start to fall into place. Whichever kind of content you’re creating, it will probably be posted in blog format (whether it’s a graphic, photo gallery, video blog, a written post or something else is up to you). Here are three of the best reasons to start a blog for your business (or to keep up the good work on the one you have!)
Thought leadership
Blogging is a great way to establish yourself as a leader in your field. Writing posts about issues in your industry allows you to position yourself as an expert, showing visitors to your site (i.e. potential sales leads) that you’re authoritative. Put yourself in a consumer’s shoes: whatever kind of product or service you’re looking for, you want to work with the most experienced and knowledgeable people, right? That’s how you want potential customers to see you when they visit your blog. Being a thought leader doesn’t require you to be constantly reading up on the latest news in the industry (although that is one tactic). Just by being yourself, you have a lot of knowledge and expertise to share. Do you have an opinion about an issue in your field? Did you solve a tricky problem at work today? Can you think of some frequently asked questions that you get from clients? Those are all examples of great material for blog posts!
Juicing up your SEO
Search engines love new content. If you are pumping out frequently updated content that uses your SEO keywords and is correctly optimized for search, you can boost your SEO ranking much better than you could with a site that just has static content on it. It’s also nice because, to a degree, what you get out of it is what you put into it: you don’t have to pay for Google Adwords or sponsored links if you have a high quality SEO optimized blog that people are visiting, commenting on, and sharing. It will take some time if you are starting from scratch, but stick with it! Simply put, blogging is power. You get to boost your SEO ranking, and you’re creating original content that belongs to you, not Facebook.
Content powers social
When you start creating content of your own and sharing it on social media, you’re providing value. That’s one of the top things you can do to gain a high-quality following on social media sites. You know your business inside and out; and that means that you have expertise and knowledge to add to the conversation. It’s just a matter of writing it down (or taking a photo, or shooting a video, or recording a podcast) and sharing it. Plus, when you create your own content, you have built-in material for sharing on social media–and when people like and share your content, that means that your site gets more clicks. “Doing social media” by sharing content that other people created is okay–but if you want to really start seeing real results from your social media marketing efforts, you need to become a content creator yourself. A blog is the one of the easiest, cheapest (try free) and most effective ways to start creating your own viral content.
Looking to take your blog beyond the basic templates? We develop custom blogs that will match your branding, and we can help you develop content and social strategies that will drive clicks to your site, plus help you understand how to create content that will be search engine optimized. Contact us today to learn more.
