Why a Blog is a Central Part of your Social Media Marketing Activity

In my view – (and I’m sure there are some exceptions), every business should have a blog.

Blogging enables you to unlock what’s going on within your business – and share it.

• Case studies
• FAQs
• Client wins
• New team
• Events you’re creating
• News items
• PR announcements
• New services
• Changes to services
• How things work
• Why you do what you do
• Who you are
• Customer service fixes
• Your expertise, though leadership
• Your viewpoints
• Your advice

All of the above provides just a quick list of the types of content you can be sharing about your organisation. And what better place to share them than via a blog, which ideally sits within your website – encouraging traffic and eyeballs back to your site to explore more about your organisation.

Two areas that all businesses should consider when it comes to blogging:

1)      We are now in an age where businesses (and people) have the resources to publish content at the touch of a few buttons. Setting up a blog (via wordpress, blogger or typepad and other blogging platforms) is a relatively simple process and provides businesses with a platform to share diverse, purposeful, educational and entertaining news via one central platform – (via mobile if you wish) enhancing your online visibility in many ways.

2)      People (ie: consumers) are increasingly fed up with ‘push’ marketing – they don’t trust the advertisers, instead they trust themselves and the content they come across and that people are sharing and talking about when they are out there on good old Google searching for the products, services or information they require.  Very simply the more relevant and purposeful content you have out on the net – then you have more chance of being found.

How does your blog tie in with social networks and social media?

Your blog is ‘social media’ – and provided that you enable your blog to be sharable by others – including the share buttons on your content – then you have created media – and that media is socially enabled.

The media you create for your blog – can be a mix of written articles, video, audio, images – it’s over to you.  My advice is to keep the format of your content mixed (a mixture of written word, audio, video, images etc) – just to keep things interesting. However, having said that, your content should be focused on helping you to deliver your business objectives – and therefore, what you create is more important than the format you create it in.

Once you’ve created your ‘media’ – and posted it to your blog – (which is socially enabled allowing anyone who reads or interacts with that content to be able to share it onto their audiences), then you can also start sharing it via your own social networks too.

Take a look at the following video to illustrate sharing and traction process via blog content

We hope this blog and our video help you to better understand why blogging is central to your social media activity.

Any views, questions – do get in touch.  In the meantime, be social and share…

Michelle Carvill is author of The Business of Being Social – A Practical Guide to Harnessing the Power of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn for all Businesses – and is also the Founder of Carvill Creative.