How Blog Content Can Help Fuel Online Conversations For Your Business

Have you logged into Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter with the intention of posting a few messages or start a discussion with the intention of promoting your business and then found yourself lost for words or ideas? Several businesses find they have Twitter accounts, groups on just about every social network registered but idle and after the initial enthusiasm of kick starting a social marketing strategy find staying active on all these social networks is just not as easy as it seems. “How do we keep it interesting every day?”, “How do we keep our communities and online customers engaged and keep an ongoing conversation online?” are common questions.

Content plays an important role in social marketing and is often to keeping the conversation and buzz going around your business.  You need to have content that you can share with the online community. The real challenge is how you generate that daily content and keep it interesting for your customers.  One great way to tackle this is starting with a very active blog. By very active, we mean one that has engaging posts, insights, reviews, articles or observations as often as possible. Useful articles and posts around your business can be very versatile and need not be restricted to the blog. Once posted, the same post or article can be Tweeted, shared on groups like Linkedin, MySpace and Facebook, posted to discussion forums or communities, converted to a down-loadable document for the website and even sent out in an email newsletter. Discussions naturally follow around these posts whether in the form of comments people leave on the blog or social sites like Mixx & Reddit, re-tweets and replies on Twitter, passed around on social networking sites and really fuel the wider online conversation around your business and help it gather momentum.

We recently developed an niche vertical based online magazine for a customer of ours to provide not just their customers but virtually the industry with fresh articles published daily with interesting content within the space. Other than the stand alone community of readers within the industry which quickly developed around the online publication the company saw this as a great opportunity to tie the blog / online magazine content to jump start their other online marketing initiatives. This included posting regularly on a large community site for the industry, posting articles and starting conversations around them on their Facebook community, Myspace and drawing more followers on Twitter. On all these groups and communities they have people who enjoy reading through, sharing and commenting on the articles which are interesting or offer some valuable insights to them. As a result, the members on all these communities have increased activity and helps the business build stronger communities and better relationships with their customers.

The common ground for all social media marketing channels and social marketing is your content. Invest in regular content and the process of having a constant conversation with your customers online will just become a whole lot easier.