Blogging for Social Media

Emily MacNair - June 8, 2009

A few months ago I touched on why blogging can be good for SEO.  Today I want to offer a few tips on the social media aspect of blogging.  One of the biggest pitfalls that we see related to blogging is that many blogs are not maintained regularly.  Typically the first few months that a blog is up and running are great, but then the posts start to reduce in frequency, sometimes only to once a month or less. This not only prevents you from making use of the blog to supplement your SEO efforts, but it can also cause your website to look out of date.  Additionally, if your blog is pulled into your social media channels or pages, those too can end up looking poorly maintained. So with that said, I want to offer a few blog post ideas that can help you to formulate future blog posts ideas. 
Identify a need of your audience. Are there common questions that are asked by your customers?  If so, try compiling the most frequently asked questions into one blog post.

What is going on in your industry right now?  Finding something topical to write about will afford you the opportunity to have your blog post position in the search results for those popular search terms. Google Trends or a Google Blog search may help you identify what is being talked about. You can then comment on those topics from your own perspective.

Provide “How-To” posts. These are a great way to offer easy instructions that help your readers.  If you have complicated/technical products, this may be especially beneficial.

Make recommendations.  The best way to engage your audience is to offer value, and the only way to offer value is to provide something that is useful to your readers. Making recommendations about other companies, products or services that compliment what you have to offer is just one way to do this.

Has a popular book recently been written by someone within your industry? Showcase an interview with the author on your blog or do a review of the book within a blog post.

Lastly, create an editorial calendar. Formulate the topics that you want to write about and spread them out over time accordingly.  This will make posting less stressful and will enable you focus on offering valuable content to your readers.