Business Blogs and Social Media Should Work Together

Business Blogs and Social Media Should Work Together

Before Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and the hundreds of other social networking sites existed, individuals and businesses used blogs as a way to share and express their thoughts. In fact, blogs can be thought of as the original social media. The whole point of blogging was to get others to read the content, comment on it, and start a conversation. Sound familiar? In recent years blogging has lost some momentum as people spend more time using “sexier” social media platforms. Businesses are being told that they need to be active on social networks in order to succeed and in an effort to catch up and make the medium work for them, have left their blogs dormant for months at a time. This is a huge mistake since social media should not replace blogging. While social media and blogging may serve similar purposes, they aren’t the same. Both are necessary parts of an integrated online marketing campaign and operating a business blog can give your social media efforts a boost and vice versa.

Social media is important for many reasons. First, it’s where the people are. Millions of people sign in to social media accounts every day to connect, share, and find information. It’s Marketing 101 that you want to be where your target audience is. An active business social media account page helps build a brand and establish loyalty and trust over time. It allows a place for businesses of all sizes to engage in a dialogue with current and potential clients or customers. Social media is a focus group and customer service outlet all in one. In addition, social media data now has search engine ranking implications. The search engines take note of social signals such as Likes, Comments, Shares, Re-Tweets, +1’s, etc. Trust plays a large role in search engine ranking and the search engines use these social signals as indicators of that trust. The thought is that a link that gets passed around in social media must be valuable, which is one reason why it’s so important to share quality content with your social followers. Where does this content come from? You guessed it. It comes from your blog.

Social media is great for having conversations and sharing content, but in order to really take advantage of it you need to be sharing your own content! This can include everything from press releases, articles, whitepapers, infograhics, e-books, and guides but as long as you are actively contributing posts to your blog on a regular basis you will continually have fuel for your social media strategy. Consumers very rarely make a purchase or decide to do business with a company before conducting some research. It’s the content that you create that provides them with the answers that they need. Depending on the industry, the sales cycle can be extremely long. Writing blog posts to share with social media followers can establish trust over time.

Ditching a business blog to concentrate on social media is a mistake. Sure, you can share content in social media but you are at the mercy of the social network. That content isn’t owned by you and there are certain limitations. Do you think that 140 characters is enough space to explain your position on a given topic or outline your business strategies to potential clients? A business blog is your property. You can do whatever you’d like with it.

There is a place for both social media and blogging within an online marketing campaign. A good strategy will integrate the two in order to achieve more links, improve SEO, and gain more visibility over time.

About the Author:

Nick Stamoulis is the President and Founder of Brick Marketing, a Boston SEO agency. For more information please call 781-999-1222 or visit http://www.brickmarketing.com.