5 Reasons Why Your Blog Should Be the Center of Your Social Media Strategy
When it comes to using social media to effectively grow your business, a blog is absolutely essential.
Here are five reasons why it should be the main attraction in your web 2.0 marketing strategy
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1. You have 100% control
If you've been in social media for a while, you know that the big sites like Twitter and Facebook make changes all the time. Each change brings new consumer behavior within the site and sometimes, a feature that helped you build your business is removed, with no way to get it back. A perfect example of this is when Facebook changed the “Groups” feature. Before the new group format was implemented, anyone on Facebook could create a group, invite their friends to that group, and then send the entire group a message to their Facebook inbox. This was a great feature, but when they changed the way groups were created in the new format, this amazing “email the group” feature went away, and all previous groups were changed to the new format. Imagine how many people were relying on that “Facebook email list” to promote their products and services, and poof, it was gone. That's why a blog should be the center of your social media strategy - because it gives you 100% control. YOU control how you treat and manage your audience.
2. You Attract the right audience
Blogs give you the unique ability to easily get people onto your website with highly valuable content, and then the chance to promote products and services that are in alignment with the content you write. What's great about this strategy is that you can first focus on creating an awesome article, and then drive traffic to it using the social media audience you've built on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. You can even add various elements into the structure and format of your post that will help you generate even more traffic. A great example is the Digg Digg plugin that'll place social media sharing buttons at the bottom of your posts. And, as your site builds authority and a lot of backlinks, your content will start showing up in Google for the key terms you targeted for each post! So not only are you getting traffic from your social media audience, but will also get a lot of search engine traffic from Google over time.
3. You can answer questions your potential customers are asking
Having a blog allows you to answer common customer questions with scale. Most company websites have an FAQ section, and you can too. You can easily use a collection of blog posts to answer questions your readers (and potential customers) have. This not only allows you to leverage the traffic to your FAQ pages to generate more pageviews, but it'll also allow those posts to be easily indexed in Google for people to find when they type in a question relating to your products. Taking it a step further, you can write blog posts that address a question that you know your target market is asking, and use that content to steer them to consider the products and services that you provide. Google loves blogs, and when you position yourself correctly, it is amazing how the power of Google sends a consistent stream of traffic into your website.
4. You can build effective backlinks
When you have a blog, it gets people to your site with high quality content, while also building backlinks that help raise your website's ranking in search engines. When you write valuable content and it's shared on social media, there's a chance it'll catch the attention of a bigger blog. And they may write an article that links directly to the article on your site. The leverage that's created by this is twofold. It creates a slew of referral traffic coming to your specific blog post from their post AND contributes to your site authority. This will translate to a higher ranking in the search engines and generate more traffic to your site.
5. You can grow your email list
One of the final reasons you should make your blog the center of your social media strategy is because writing content and driving traffic to it is one of the easiest ways to build your email list. When visitors come to a website where they like the content and have the opportunity to sign up to receive it via email, this gives you the power to keep talking to an audience who already loves you versus relying on Google to send you a consistent stream of traffic via search engines. The key thing you must figure out is the best place to position your opt-in form on your blog. Do that and watch your email list grow. If you need more list building help, you can also check out Get Subscribers: How To Build an Intentional and Profitable Email Marketing Machine in 18 Days or Less.
Do you have a blog? Share the link below in the comments and tell us how it's part of your social media strategy.