Creating a blog strategy is an important element and takes up a large part of your overall Content Marketing plan. After all, your blog is the main driver of organic traffic for your website and the way you can differentiate your brand from the competition by positioning yourself as an innovative leader.
However, blog strategy is much more complicated than defining a few topics and choosing keywords. A complete plan includes many other Digital Marketing components, such as SEO best practices, design and formatting elements, and social media.
Social media and blog strategies need to be aligned. Otherwise, you will miss out on distribution opportunities, new audiences, good SERP rankings, and much more.
Not every marketing professional understands the value of working with social networks and blog in parallel. So this article will help you with a list of the top 10 reasons why you should do exactly that.
Reason 1: Share content with your followers
Your social media followers are members of the public who have already demonstrated their dedication to your company and your brand. By choosing to become followers of your social media accounts, they proved they like your content, products, services, or a combination of all.
Thus, logically, that audience of followers will be interested in the new content that you produce with your blog strategy. Sharing this material on your social networks through well-thought-out posts or immediate links after each publication exposes the content to those who are likely to read it .
If you don’t include a social plan in your blog strategy, you can lose viewing opportunities on your posts and increase traffic to new pages. Including a plan to share new content on the channels will give you more visibility among the public.
You can also automate sharing posts so that when you make a new blog post, it’s automatically shared on social media for followers to see. That will help you not forget to share new content and lose potential traffic.
Reason 2: Reach new audiences
Sharing on social media not only connects your blog posts with your audience, but it can also help you reach new audiences and increase your blog traffic . By using different techniques in your social media distribution plan, you can showcase new content to more audiences.
Techniques that should be tried include:
- use relevant hashtags for each post;
- publish in groups or pages specific to your sector;
- Promote your posts to appear at the top of social media platforms.
Without planning these stages in your blog strategy, it will be a big challenge to reach your audience with new content.
Reason 3: Improve SEO
Social networks can be used to improve SEO, benefiting your positioning on search engine results pages . This allows your content to be found more easily in search engines.
By creating consistency and connections between your blog and your social media accounts, you build more authority for SEO in the eyes of search engines. You build trust with your audience by delivering useful content and sharing it with as many users as possible, which helps increase your authority and rank higher.
Reason 4: Collect valuable data
A social network is an excellent tool to monitor reactions to your content and you can use your accounts to obtain valuable information about your audience .
Most social tools have incredibly detailed analytics and reports to help you understand the actions your audience takes when you share new content.
You can also use third-party tools to get additional information about the social media report when posting a new blog article. Keeping track of these documents will help you collect relevant user data.
For example, if you share a blog post on social media and it gets a large number of shares, views, and comments, you can use this data to understand what types of blog posts are most important to your audience segments.
You can also use social media as a way to test how your new types of content impact your audience. By reviewing analytics and reports to see what actions followers take when you share new topics, you can monitor their reactions and responses.
If you get few reactions and low click-through rates, you can evaluate if there is room for improvement or ways to create strategies to get your content more traffic.
Reason 5: Improve the quality of your blogs
Social networks not only help you see the success of your blogging strategy, but can also help you gain insights into the quality of your content . If you notice that your social followers or new traffic is coming mostly from the networks and they are clicking on your links, but they are quickly leaving the page, something is not right.
It may be that your content does not exactly answer the question you ask in the title or is not of sufficient quality to retain readers. In any case, you will know that there is something that you have to change.
A Fresh Essays specialist advises trying new alterations and upgrades to see if your numbers improve. Among them we can mention:
- create intriguing titles that capture the attention of your audience;
- try images that attract more;
- improve blog design;
- include new topics of interest;
- draw the public’s attention to induce them to click.
Reason 6: Find the best hashtags for your brand
Every industry has a myriad of hashtags that are used regularly to try to capture new audiences and find those who are interested in what the company has to say.
However, this leads to over-content on popular hashtags in the industry.
You may even notice that not all content shared with specific hashtags has much to do with the blog posts that used them. This is because brands get so used to using the same hashtags that they don’t think to branch out and try different tags for different blog topics.
The social network helps you find the right hashtags that are not overused and that match the context of the content you develop. Testing different hashtags to see if they attract new readers or generate clicks is a great way to use social media to improve your blogging strategy.
There are many tools that can help you with hashtag research, so try different options to see which one will give you the best results and optimize your strategy.
Reason 7: Align your team’s actions
When you have blog and social network strategies working in parallel, it is possible to have much more adequate internal team management . Marketing teams are often divided and currently work remotely, without the benefits of a shared environment.
For this reason, when you do not have an alignment between your different marketing strategies, it can lead to a lack of communication and general dissatisfaction of your marketing teams.
Using project management tools like Studio helps teams coordinate their programs and campaigns. Plus, it simplifies tasks, offers rich reports that can be shared across teams, and encourages internal collaboration, even when people aren’t in the same office.
Reason 8: Increase blog engagement
Social networks were developed to facilitate and streamline communication with your customers, leads and prospects . It is also one of the best ways to create real connections with your audience and find the best ways to reach your audience.
The use of relevant hashtags shows your content to users when they want to see it and you can take advantage of them to encourage interaction with them. You can include direct requests like “comment” or “share” on your posts.
Another way to increase user engagement is to use memes, GIFs, videos, or graphics to encourage them to click on links they might have missed while browsing social media.
You can also incentivize your audience to share the important parts of your blog posts by providing integrations where they can extract quotes from your article and immediately post them to Twitter, or add polls and chat options right into your blog content.
All of these strategies will help increase engagement and traffic to your blog, as well as encourage new readers to subscribe or follow you on social media to stay connected and receive new content as it is published.
Reason 9: Research the competition
As you work to connect your social media strategy to your blog, your competition is doing the same. You can try subscribing or remember to check your competitor’s blogs regularly to see what’s new, but you can also use the social network to find new posts from your competitors .
By tracking your competition’s tags or seeing what else is posting in the same categories as you, using the same hashtags, you’ll find posts on similar topics, without having to go and research their websites.
You can also use the social network to find new brands that you may not yet recognize as competition, and check what kinds of blog posts they’re doing.
Reason 10: Establish a dialogue
While a blog post can be well-researched, provide great insights, answer key questions, and address your audience’s key weaknesses, it’s still a pretty limited way to communicate with your customers and leads.
Even with a comments section built into your blog layout, you’ll often find that there isn’t much dialogue on the page. This can be unpleasant for you and your marketing team.
Social networks, on the other hand, are designed to create conversations . When you share blog posts on your social channels, you realize that there are many more opportunities for discussion to take place between followers and new readers.
Not only can you read the comments or posts that accompany shared content to understand followers’ reactions to the new content, but you can also follow and view discussions among your audience members.
Social threads and comments can help you understand reactions among followers and gain valuable insight into how your audience is receiving your content.
When conversations about blog posts become more and more common, every time a new article is published, it is possible to gain a large following and increase interest in the content, as well as improve the overall strategy of the blog to include topics that stimulate the debate.
Conclusion: Having a plan for social networks is fundamental to the strategy of a blog
If you do not align your blog and your social networks, you will have gaps in the way you share information with your audience. You will also miss out on many opportunities to expand and grow your content readership.
Despite the fact that social networks are a key element of Digital Marketing, which can help you improve your blog strategy, there are also other elements that need to be included in your digital planning. SEO, for example, should guide and influence Content Marketing.
