Engage With Your Audience Through Blogging

If your business has a website then you will be eager to find out more about blogging. The reason for this is that blogging will allow you the engage and interact with your target audience and find out more about their specific questions and observations about your brand,

The interactivity of a blog is only one of its powerful features that can extend the reach of a brand. Blogs are now recognized as part of the social media environment for a number of reasons. The first of these is that a blog builds social relations with an identified demographic target segment and the second being that the business can use the blog to position both their products an the senior management as expert in their industry sector.

A blog makes sharing engaging, relevant and unique content extremely simple. Once the company has identified which products or brands to position they will maximize the opportunities presented by the blog by proactively placing this content in th blog according to a regular schedule.

The ideal content mix is debatable, however social media experts have recommended that content should contain video, images (infographics are particularly effective) and copy.

However most blogs are heavy on the copy, supported by other media such as video content.Some concrete recommendations for content include white papers and other research. External content can also be curated on the blog. In fact placing links to the content produced by other authorities is an extremely effective way of increasing the reach and content of the blog.

The blog also acts as part of the social media ecosystem due to the fact that quality content can be shared across the social media sites of many readers, increasing the reach of the company's key messages. Ideally this sharing will lead to other authoritative blog owners linking to the site and further extending its reach.

Having a blog also increases the effectiveness of the other social media sites that the company has in its social media real estate. The blog is a repository of information that can act as a link target for information supplied on other social media sites and as such can provide more detail on subjects that are highlighted in the other social media sites.

There is some discussion among experts as to how often a blog should be updated, but the consensus seems to be that at least one new blog entry should be placed into the blog every two days. If the business might find this onerous then it is worth noting that when producing blog content it can sometimes be preferable to outsource the function to content marketing experts who will also be able to measure the effectiveness of the blog as a marketing tool.

By analyzing content and the reactions of the readers to the content, as well as the sharing activity involving the content an expert content marketer will be able to advise the organization on how to refine their messages and increase the engagement potential of the blog.