Creating a blog strategy is an important and large part of your overall content marketing plan.
After all, your blog is the main driver of organic traffic to your site and the way you can set yourself and your brand apart from the competition by positioning yourself as a thought leader.
But your blog strategy is much more complicated than coming up with a few topics and picking out keywords.
A well-rounded plan will include many other digital marketing components, including SEO best practices, design and formatting elements, and social media.
Social media and blog content strategies need to be aligned. If not, you’ll miss out on distribution opportunities, new audiences, search engine result page rankings, and much more.
Not every marketer understands the value of working social media in a blog strategy, so this article will help you out by listing the top 10 reasons why you should do exactly that.
Reason #1: Share Content with Your Followers
Your social media followers are audience members who have already proven their dedication to your company and brand.
By choosing to become followers of your social media accounts, they’ve demonstrated that they enjoy your content, products, services, or a combination of all.
It stands to reason then that this audience of followers will be interested in the new content you produce in your blog strategy.
Sharing your content among your social channels through thoughtful posts or immediate links after publishing gets content in front of those most likely to read it.
If you don’t include a social plan in your blog strategy, you can miss out on the opportunities to gain views on your blog posts and increase traffic to new pages.
Including plans to share new content on social channels will give you more alignment and visibility to audiences.
You can also automate your content sharing so that the minute you publish a new blog post, it is automatically shared across your social channels for followers to see.
This will help make sure you never forget to share a new content piece and miss out on potential traffic.
Reason #2: Reach New Audiences
Sharing content on social media doesn’t just connect your blog posts to your existing audience, it can also help you reach new audiences and gain more traffic to your blog.
By using different techniques in your social distribution plan, you can get new content in front of more audiences.
Techniques to try include:
- Using relevant hashtags in each post.
- Posting in groups or pages specific to your industry.
- Promoting your posts to appear at the top of social media platforms.
Without planning these steps into your blog strategy, you’ll find yourself struggling to get ahead of audiences with your new content.
Reason #3: Improve SEO
Social media can be used to improve your SEO, which benefits your position on search engine results pages and makes it easier for your content to be found on search engines.
By creating consistency and connections between your blog and your social media accounts, you generate more authority for SEO in the eyes of search engines.
You’re building trust with your audience by providing useful content and sharing it with as many viewers as possible, and this helps to increase your authority and helps you rank higher.
Reason #4: Gain Valuable Data
Social media works as an excellent tool to monitor reactions to your content, and you can use your social media accounts to gain valuable insights about your audience.
Most social tools have incredibly detailed analytics and reporting built in to help you understand the actions your audience takes when you share new content.
You can also use third-party tools to gain additional insights into social reporting when you post a new blog article. Keeping on top of those social reports will help you collect valuable user data.
For example, if you share a blog post on social media and it gets a large number of shares, views, and comments, you can use that data to see what type of blog posts are most interesting to your target audience segments.
You can also use social media as a way to test how your new types of content resonate with audiences.
By checking your analytics and reporting to see the actions followers take when you share new topics, you can monitor reactions and responses.
If you are getting dull reactions and low click rates, you know that there is still room to improve or ways to strategize about your content to gain more traffic.
Reason #5: Improve the Quality of Your Blogs
Not only does social help you see the success of your blog strategy, but it can also help you gain insights into the quality of your blogs.
If you notice that your social followers or new traffic through social media are clicking on your links but are quickly bouncing away from the actual page, you know that something isn’t right.
Whether your content isn’t quite answering the question you ask in the title or the content itself doesn’t have the quality to hold the attraction of readers, you know that something needs to change.
Fresh Essays Specialist advises to play around and test new changes and updates to see if your numbers improve, including:
- Creating intriguing titles that capture your audiences’ attention.
- Trying out new eye-catching images.
- Improving blog layouts and designs.
- Including new topics of interest.
- Shocking audiences to entice them to click.
Reason #6: Find the Best Hashtags for Your Brand
Every industry has a multitude of hashtags that they use regularly to try and capture new audiences and find those who are interested in what they have to say.
However, this leads to an overabundance of content in popular industry hashtags.
You might even notice that not all the content shared under specific hashtags has much to do with the blog posts that have used them.
This occurs because brands get so used to using the same hashtags they don’t think about branching out and trying different tags for different blog topics.
Social media helps you find the right hashtags that aren’t overused and match the context of the content you create.
Testing out different hashtags to see whether they bring in new readers or aren’t bringing in any clicks at all is a great way to use social media to improve your blog strategy.
There are many tools that can help you with hashtag research, so try out different options to see which is going to bring you the best results and encourage improvement in your hashtag strategy.
Reason #7: Align The Efforts of Your Team
When you have social media strategies, content strategies, and blog strategies that are all in alignment, you can have much more successful internal team management.
Marketing teams are often divided and, in current years, work remotely without the benefits of a shared office environment.
Because of this, when you don’t have alignment between your different marketing strategies, it can lead to miscommunication and overall unhappiness within your marketing teams.
Using project management tools like Studio helps teams manage their programs and campaigns by streamlining tasks, providing insightful reports that can be shared across teams, and encouraging internal collaboration — even when not in the same office.
Reason #8: Increase Engagement in Your Blogs
Social media has developed to be easier and faster for your customers, leads, and prospects to use.
Social is also one of the best ways to create real connections with your audiences and find the most appropriate ways to reach them.
Using relevant hashtags gets your content in front of users when they want to see it, and you can take advantage of that audience mindset to encourage participation in your content.
You can include direct requests like “comment” or “share” in your posts.
Another way to increase user engagement is to use memes, GIFs, videos, or graphics to encourage your audiences to click on links they might have otherwise ignored during their social media feed scrolls.
You can also make it easier for your audience to share the important parts of your blog posts by providing integrations where they can pull quotes from your blog article and immediately tweet them out or adding polls and chat options directly to your blog content.
All of these strategies will help to increase both engagement and traffic in your blog as well as encourage your new readers to subscribe to your blog or follow your social media accounts to stay connected and see new content as it is published.
Reason #9: Research Your Competitors
While you work to create cohesion and alignment between your social media strategy and your blog strategy, your competitors are doing the same.
You can try subscribing or remembering to check in on your competitors’ blogs on a regular basis to see what’s new, but you can also use social media to find new, competing posts.
By tracking tags from your competitors or seeing what else they are posting in the same categories with the same hashtags, you’ll find the blog posts your competition posts about similar subjects without having to search through their websites.
You can also use social media to find new brands that you might not have previously recognized as competitors and see what types of blog posts they are creating in your space.
Reason #10: Create Conversations
While your blog post might be well-researched, provide great insights, answer key questions, and address major pain points of your audience, it is still a fairly stagnant way to communicate with your customers and leads.
Even with a comments section built into your blog formats, you’ll often find that there isn’t much conversation happening on the page, which can be demoralizing to you and your marketing team.
Social media, on the other hand, is designed to create conversations.
When you share your blog posts on your social channels, you’ll find that there are many more opportunities for discussion to occur among followers and new readers.
Not only can you read the comments or social posts that accompany shares to understand your followers’ reactions to new content, but you can follow and watch the discussions happening between your audience members.
Social threads and comments can help you understand the reactions among followers and learn valuable data about how your audience is receiving your content.
When conversations regarding your blog posts become more and more common every time you publish a new article, you’ll not only gain a larger following, but you can increase the interest in your content and improve your overall blog strategy to include topics that spark conversation.
Wrap Up: Social Media Plan is Fundamental to Blog Strategy
Without alignment between your blogs and your social content calendar, you’ll find gaps between information sharing in your audience as well as many missed opportunities to expand and grow your content readership.
While social media is one key element of digital marketing that can help improve your content marketing strategy, there are also other elements that need to be included in your digital program.
SEO, for example, needs to guide and influence content marketing.
If you are a digital marketer who wants to understand more about SEO and the best practices to rank high and increase your influence, then check out our SEO guide!
This resource will give you all the information you need to know about SEO tactics and strategies.
