5 Sound Reasons to Begin Your Small Business Social Media Marketing with a Blog

By Neal Schaffer

Social media is an important medium that every small business should be embracing to help develop new business, understand what others are saying about them and/or their competitors, engage with and increase the loyalty of their customers and fans, and potentially even provide another avenue for customer support over social channels. There are many choices of sites in which companies can invest money and time in building a presence on, with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube being the most popular. At the end of the day, however, one of your primary objectives for your small business in engaging in social media marketing, especially from a business development perspective, should be in leading potential new customers back to your website. And for this reason, the best investment you can make in social media marketing is to first begin a corporate blog. The reasons are simple:1) Gives your small business a social voice.

What are you going to say in social media? While there are many ways to engage with others, having your own resourceful content is a great way to start, comment on, or join other conversations. This will naturally lead to not only more people engaging with you, but also more website visitors engaging with your content.

2) Creates healthy habits that are vital to social media success.

By sharing industry-related information on your blog, it will create new fans of your company and help you establish positioning as experts in your field. It will also foster development of a habit of creating content and sharing information that are vital for the success of your company’s social presence.

3) Easily integrates into a comprehensive social media strategy.

It will generate the content by which you can base your social media strategy implementation on. All social strategies need to address this issue of content, so your blogging will make this section of your social media strategy that much easier to create.

4) Shareable content gets shared

If you’re looking to utilize the sometimes viral nature of social media to help spread the word about your company, conversations and quotes alone won’t do it. You need content, and it needs to be resourceful and shareable. Creating shareable content should be the job of a talented Content Czar if you have the budget.

5) The SEO of social media.

Tweeting and sharing your blog content on the various social networking sites will lead to an even greater SEO benefit through the fact that search engines are tracking social shares and beginning to reflect them in search results. It also naturally leads to others in social circles who want to link to your content for their own blog posts, which naturally creates the organic backlinks that are so critical to search engine optimization. After all, who wants to link to a company or product page? – unless they are your distributor, of course Finally, blogging increases the amount of and frequency of revising content on your home page, providing you even greater SEO benefits. This will all result in more visits to your website as your blog content gets indexed and analyzed by search engines over time.

Success in social media marketing can require a lot of time and patience.  Don’t underestimate the hidden powers of business blogs.  Beginning your efforts by establishing a corporate blog will create a perfect launching pad for your social presence while attracting new visitors to the social side of your website. It is a sound tactic to begin your social marketing with.

What has your small business blogging experience been like?

Video explaining this blog post in Japanese appears below. 日本語のご説明は以下のビデオをご覧下さい。