Social media: Creating a blueprint for an effective blog

Social media: Creating a blueprint for an effective blog

By Callan Green/Special to the U-T

Sunday, December 12, 2010 at 8:26 p.m.

Social Media Monday is a weekly feature that helps businesses and consumers understand how to use social media tools to their best advantage. This week’s feature is by Callan Green (@CallanPaola), blog manager and social media account executive at Bailey Gardiner, a San Diego marketing agency.

Creating a company blog can be a huge asset to your business’s social media strategy. Blogs help with managing brand messages, positioning your company as a thought leader, improving search engine ranking and getting more visitors to your website. With all these benefits, it is no surprise that an estimated 34 percent of companies have blogs, a number that is expected to rise to 46 percent by 2012.

With so many blogs already in existence, your company will need to do more than just start writing. You need a strategy to cut through the clutter and ensure that blogging impacts your overall business goals. Below are the eight things to outline before you write your first post.

Choose your target audience

This is who you are creating your content for and will likely be the same people your business is targeting. Being extra-specific in this selection is helpful. If your target audience is too broad, your content will speak to no one.

Establish the blog’s tone

Depending on your target audience, create guidelines on the overall feeling of the blog’s content. Is it fun? Sympathetic? Knowledgeable? Educational? This will be especially important for company blogs with more than one blogger, so that all the voices remain consistent.

Set goals

A blog is useless without measurable goals. Select the blog’s main goal, often tied to the company’s financial goals, and then outline all of the subgoals. These can include anything from improved search engine ranking, to less-tangible goals like an increase in awareness or affinity for the brand.

Create a measurement system

To keep your goals in check, be sure to define how you will measure the blog’s success. Tools like Google Analytics will show you how much traffic your blog is getting, how much traffic the blog drives to the website pages, what content is the most interesting to the readers, and how people are finding your content. Tracking growth in these areas can help you analyze and shift strategy over time.

Pick your contributors

First, you should identify a blog manager who will be in charge of the editorial calendar and will manage all other contributors. Then you can identify potential bloggers, whether they are other employees or guest bloggers from outside the company.

Find your keywords

This is where it gets a little techy, but if you want your blog to be found via Google search, this step is a must. Researching keywords is a combination of looking at what words you want to be found under and what the competition is for these words. Once selected, these words will be used in everything from your programming to your category creation.

Establish your posting frequency

Consistency is imperative for growing readers’ trust. In order to ensure that your blog keeps a consistent posting schedule, establish what your target frequency will be per week. It is best to start with a lower frequency and increase it than to set an unachievable goal.

Create a commenting protocol

Commenting is one of the biggest concerns for most companies when beginning a blog. Many fear that their blog will receive negative comments, so it is best to have a strategy for handling those beforehand to avoid a blog crisis.

While outlining a blog strategy can seem like a daunting task in the beginning, it will aid in decision making for every aspect of the blog’s creation. The strategy will affect category creation, blog roll selection, and layout and design, not to mention the actual writing of blog posts. In the end, the time you take to define the strategy will be imperative to the blog’s success.

Join the conversation: Are you a social media professional in San Diego County? We’re looking for tips and advice. Contact Money Editor Diana McCabe on Twitter @mcdiana or the U-T’s social media specialist Rob Hopwood @sdutHopwood.

via signonsandiego.com