Your blog and your social media accounts are both essential parts of building an online presence for your brand. Years ago, blogging and social media were separate, but now they complement each other. People usually separate these two things and use them to reach different goals. When you’re not blogging for social media, you aren’t benefitting from the full impact that these tools can have on your brand. You can use blogs to enrich your social media with long-form posts and use social media to promote your blog.
Let’s discuss how you can make your marketing more efficient by writing a blog for your brand.
Why Is Blogging Useful?
A blog helps build a relationship with your audience. A good blog fosters important person-to-person connections. It transfers knowledge, ideas, and experiences to the reader. By publishing a blog, you’re showing that you are a thought leader on whatever particular subject you are blogging. A good blog helps you establish authority in the space you are writing about. Blogging for social media can also convert traffic to leads and leads to customers.
How Do I Write A Blog?
Now that we know why a blog is important to your brand, you are probably wondering how and where to start one. There are a few things you should include in each blog post when blogging for social media.
Make Your Post Relevant
If your content isn’t relevant, it doesn’t matter much. Remember, you are using your blog to establish value and authority in whatever space you are in. A blog about street paving will not go over very well for a page that focuses on the roofing industry. You’ll likely lose some branding power as well. Relevance should be your number one priority when writing a blog post. Know your audience and do keyword research to find important information that is missing in the space.
Make Your Post Useful
It’s not enough to just be relevant on a subject. Your post needs to give your readers information that they did not have before. It needs to be useful and important information, things that educate your audience. People appreciate information they can do something with. “How To” posts are great subjects that offer useful information relevant to your industry.
Your blog isn’t the space for any thought or opinion that pops in your head unless, of course, that is the industry you provide services for. Make it useful.
Use Keywords
Keyword research is one of the most important steps you can take before writing your blog. Selecting the right keywords and knowing how to add them to your blog posts is key to ranking higher in search engine results.
Proper keyword research will not only improve your search positions but also will help you choose the right hashtags for your social media posts. Yes, you can just add a #marketing hashtag when you are writing about marketing, but it will be useless. The marketing niche is pretty wide. The most general words you use, the more posts there will be of it, which means yours will stay unnoticed.
Check hashtags using your keywords. Are they too popular or not used often? Make sure that if someone searches for the hashtag, they will see your most recent post on the topic.
Engage Your Readers
A blog post must be well written. It needs to be personal, interesting, and interactive. Let your personality shine in your writing. Personal stories are a great way to make a post more engaging and help show real-life examples of problems your company can solve.
Spark A Discussion
This goes hand in hand with engaging your reader, but it is so important to generate a conversation around your blog. Don’t forget to include your reader in your blog posts. Ask for feedback, thoughts, and comments in your call to action at the end of the post. Don’t forget to take part once the discussion starts by responding to comments!
Ensure It Is Easy To Read
Nobody is going to read a big wall of text. Even if it’s the most well-written blog post with the most useful information ever, nobody is going to read it if it is hard to read. Bullets, lists, and images are great ways to make sure your content is easy to read. Before you publish your work, preview it to ensure it is scannable. Don’t let them get bored before they even start reading. (Also, don’t let them get bored – ever. But that’s the point of most of this post, right?)
Keep It An Appropriate Length
The length of a good blog post is remains to be varied depending on who you ask. Some say a good blog post is around 500 words, while others say anything less than 1,500 isn’t worth it.
We try to keep our posts at an average of 1,000 words, but we never hold firm to a limit. A blog post should be as long as it needs to be. Don’t worry about adding a bunch of filler if you can get your point across in 400 words. As long as you offer quality, your blog length will not be a huge issue.
Maintaining Your Blog
Once you’ve started your well-thought-out, engaging, appropriately length blog, there is still work you need to do to maintain it. One step necessary to take is to identify your best-performing content. It’s obvious, but it’s worth noting. Tracking the number of shares on social media lets you see what kind of content engages users the most. This kind of data can help you come up with new topics and keywords for future posts.
You should also track your competitors’ engagement to see how users are interacting with them. Check out what is performing best on their sites to further develop your content planning.
As mentioned above, make sure you are replying to comments, questions, and thoughts from your followers. The work does not end once the blog is published. The whole point is to engage with your audience, so engage with them!
Final Thoughts
Crafting good content in a blog helps you to promote your brand as a thought leader in the space relevant to your industry. It also provides extra content for your social media channels. How do you craft your content? Let us know in the comments what strategies are your favorite!
