Blogging offers marketers many powerful advantages, and these days there are few successful social-media marketing strategies that don't include a blog as a core element.
Here are five reasons blogging is crucial to your social-media marketing strategy.
- It creates natural opportunities for social-media updates. Every blog post is something new and valuable to share with your followers on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media.
- It makes you more than a content curator. Most social-media marketers repost content created by others, but those who also share original, high-value content attract the most followers. A blog is the best way to regularly produce original content that showcases your knowledge and establishes your credibility in the social-media marketplace.
- It forces you to be disciplined about creating content. One of the biggest stumbling blocks of social-media marketing is making content creation a priority. Publishing a blog requires you to develop a process to systematically create and share content on the web and social media.
- It can bring your team into your social-media community. Through their contributions to your organization's blog, your staff can take an active role in the dialogue between your company and your social-media followers, which helps humanize your brand and increase engagement with followers.
- It can dramatically impact your website's visibility. Creating regular, new, keyword-rich content in your blog posts will boost your site's rankings on Google and other search engines and attract more visitors to your website. Those visitors are likely to follow you on social media if you have links to your social-media channels placed prominently on your site.
Though it's a commitment of time and resources, blogging is a great foundation for social-media marketing and an especially effective marketing element. In my own case, blogging has boosted my website to page one on Google for search terms related to my business and created valuable new business opportunities.
