Your blog as the center of your social media solar system
In Content Marketing Institute's recent B2B Content Marketing report [.pdf], blogging was the 6th most popular content choice, behind social media, articles, in-person events, enewsletters and case studies. But of even greater interest is the report’s discovery of a “confidence gap”: only 40% of their respondents rated blogs as effective, while a considerable 60% said it was “less effective/ineffective. ”
What it is
Shorthand for “Weblog, the blog offers an easy way to present brief chunks of frequently refreshed Web content. Backed with easy-to-use technologies for syndication (e.g. RSS), comments and trackbacks, blogs are often the blazing centers of social media solar systems that can incorporate sophisticated SEO strategies and community-building campaigns.
3 key play points:
- Encourage conversations: even “bad” comments can be an opportunity for developing good customer relations.
- Be a good netizen: participate on other blogs as well as your own. Develop a Top 15 hit list where you need to be “hanging out. ”
- Loosen up. Authenticity trumps perfection when connecting with readers.
More where this came from:
Further reading:
- 10 Blogging Tips for Beginners and Experts @ junta42.com
- Content Marketing Playbook 2011 @ contentmarketinginstitute.com (.pdf)
The 6 web services that really count for your business
- Google is a search engine. People search for things.
- Youtube is a search engine. People search for things to watch.
- Facebook is the Walmart of Social Media. Get used to it.
- LinkedIn is a rolodex for business people who aren’t on Twitter.
- Twitter is 21st Century telephony. Pick up the phone, hang up and get back to work.
- Blogs are for people who aren’t addicted to Twitter, who know about SEO and produce most of the content on all the places listed above.
He concludes:
For people actually doing this stuff in a business context, resources are limited and decisions about allocation are vital.
You don’t have to be everywhere to be somewhere.
Do you agree these six are the most (and maybe only) web services to watch?
And how would you re-phrase his definitions?
Social media as a traffic source: it’s just Facebook and Twitter
Using audience and traffic as your way of measuring success may be a bit old fashioned. After all, in social media, it’s all about the relationships, not about unique visitors or pageviews. Then again, audience and traffic are the least “fuzzy” of social media metrics and their trends might teach you a lot about how your activities in the social media space are received.
Technorati's State of the Blogosphere is based on a survey of [mainly U.S.] 7,200 bloggers. Full presentation is embedded below, but this particular strike is interesting when you use traffic to your site as your main KPI:
