Blogging is another tool in your Social Media Locker that you can use to share information and engage with your audience. When you start to write your blog, consider the following:
1. Audience
Central to all of your social media should be knowing your audience. Who do you want to read your blog? Write in their language.
As an accountant, if you are trying to appeal to your potential clients, don’t put them off by using technical language. Nothing is more likely to make me stop reading your blog than long words!
Ensure the blog post is relevant and useful to your audience – not many people will want to read in your business blog about the terrible journey you had home last Friday!
2. Professional
The blog is representing your company, make sure it is not full of spelling and grammatical errors.
Use white space to make it easier to read and where appropriate images help make a blog easier to read and understand.
3. Link to Website
If people find your blog either through your other forms of Social Media, you want to keep them looking at the information about your business.
I would generally recommend including your blog within your company website – or very closely attached. Once you have captured interest, why not keep it?
If your website doesn’t have the facility for blogging, create a blog using wordpress or blogger, but make sure you have clear signposts to and from your website.
4. Keywords
Think about the title of your blog – and your content. Can you tweak the title to be more friendly to search engines?Consider what your audience would type in to Google when searching for the information in your blog – and use these words as your title.
5. Call To Action
What do you want your audience to do when they have read your blog? I don’t like blogs that sell to me, but you don’t want the audience to just go away. Get them to do something, once they have read your blog. This could be as simple as a comment on the content, a tweet or like, sign up to your newsletter, give you a call, download a document or read another blog.
It is a good idea to put the call to action at the bottom of the blog.
6. Regular
It is a good idea to create blog posts regularly and frequently. I try to do a couple of posts a month – others will do a couple a week. You need to think about how much time you have to write good quality posts as well as making sure that each post is useful to your audience. Ideally, you will schedule the content of your blog posts several months in advance.
Blogging is one of the Social Media tools available to you. Each business needs to decide whether it is a tool for them based on their audience and their own resources. If you would like help with this, do give me a call.