Social Media for Small Business: To Blog or Not To Blog

Welcome to So-Me for Small B; A Series on Social Media Integration for Small Businesses!

This will be a regular feature here on T#SM and I hope that you learn something new!

Part One: To Blog or Not To Blog

(Is that even a question?!)

Blogging and Social Media pretty much go hand in hand, but there are right times to blog and wrong ones. The key thing you want to look at when this comes into play is what you will be blogging about. Utilizing Blogging as a strategy to enhance your business is about the same thing social media is really about: Shareable Content. 

So what makes what you have to say shareable? Is it relevant to your business? Can you write regularly about it? Would your target demographic be interested in reading a blog related to your business?

These are all things that you have to think about before jumping on the blogging bandwagon: 

• Don't Blog Just To Blog! Have a reason for blogging, and a passion for it wouldn't hurt either! If you can't come up with at least 20 topics you could blog about off of the top of your head (give yourself a few days to think about it) then maybe a blog isn't the right option for you!
• Is Blogging Relevant to your Business? Anybody can write what they did that day or how their business is doing, but a blog isn't a space for advertising (ahem, not in that sense anyway) and it certainly isn't an avenue for only promoting your products. Just like any aspect of social media, blogging is about sharing and conversation.
  
  Businesses that blogging would be relevant to are businesses that have fresh content all of the time.
• What will make people enjoy reading your blog? Posting pictures of your new products and telling everybody how awesome they are is only half of the job. (Maybe even 1/3!) A great blog teaches you something, and it makes you want to know more! Are tutorials an option for you? Could you talk about how your products are made? Do you have new and exciting information relevant to your industry?
• A Blog Is NOT A Diary! Contrary to popular belief, most successful blogs aren't people sitting down writing about how their day went. They have real content. They produce assets like whitepapers, downloadables, shareables like coupons and tutorials, videos and more. Blogging is about being creative and productive.
• Do you need the cross-marketing platform? Blogs feed into other social media sites and vice-versa, so they can work well as a leverage tool for bumping up your SEO, creating more visibility in the market and even reaching a more targeted audience. This, however, is only achieveable if your blog is rich in content that is actually shareable. News-style formats work well even if its just re-populating existing news stories because they are constantly feeding refreshed content through the system. Blogs that share productive items like Tutorials, DIY's and Infographics are also popular because their content is unique to them and thus even more shareable.

Ultimately it comes down to whether or not your content is marketable! If you think that you can create regular updates that are targeted toward your demographic and relevant to your business, then maybe a blog is for you! But if you're not sure, feel free to post your Q's and I'll give you some A's!