Influence via Blogging on Social Media
In our previous post, Facilitate Viralocity on Social Media, we took a look at ideas for helping your social media efforts go viral, thus expanding your influence. In this post, we examine blogging as a way to make your voice heard.
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A major way you can influence your community is by blogging. Don’t let the sobering fact that tens of thousands of blogs are created each day stop you from starting your own. Make sure you know what you want to say, and what your point of view and style will be before getting started. You’ll need to do more than just start a blog and hope they will come; you’ll need to promote it. And once you get people to your blog, you must be sure you’re giving them something of value, not necessarily just your opinion.
You should include a blog on your Website for sure, and also on as many blog sites as you can. However, cross-posting – posting the same blog on multiple sites – is discouraged by Google’s latest site ranking algorithms. It’s possible to use a site such as Ping.fm[1] to put the same material on each site, but it’s best for your readers and for search engines if you modify it for the intended audiences on the other sites.
If possible, get yourself invited to be a guest blogger by a more-influential site. It’s a great way for both sites to benefit, and for you to find an audience. By the same token, having guests post on your blog can introduce their audience to your blog.
You can even ask other bloggers to blog about you, but you should have a good reason why they’d want to.
When blogging, always remember, like all social media, blogging is not a one-way channel. It’s not just a way for you to present your agenda and point of view. It’s a way for your community to respond to you. So you should definitely enable comments on your blog. Doing this may cause you a little extra work — monitoring and responding, and even removing offensive posts — but you’ll find the interaction not only stimulating, but traffic-building.
Everywhere you are on social media, think about making an offer of some kind, like offering help or more information if a reader takes some action. A good place to do this is as a standing part of your blog’s author bio. It can be as simple as, “Email me for more info on _____” or as a link to your site for more information. You can also take a page from Hotmail’s viral success and incorporate your offer and a link to your blog into your email signature.[2]
Influence via Blogging on Social Media is the 61st in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 190. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV
See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1
Next up: Get Found on Social Media
[1] Ping.fm: bit.ly/dwbqG3
[2] Advice on email sigs: bit.ly/9eCOfM
