Priming Your Business Blog For Social Media

There are plenty of tools you can use to improve the performance of your small business blog, but creating a blog that can easily be shared on social media sites can be just as important for building brand and traffic these days.

Here at BizSugar.com, we see our share of business blogs and know some of the factors that can improve a blogs standing in a small business community. Are any of these factors that could help with your blog?

Write titles for humans.This is good advice whether you share your post on a social media site or not but some blog posts can certainly be written with search engines, and SEO in particular, in mind. It’s helpful to remember, though that when you share your blog post on a social media site, choosing the most optimised terms is less important than choosing a title or introduct that will make lots of people want to read your link, vote for or “like” it and share it with others.

Know your audience.Though the audience for your blog may be a much tighter niche, understand the needs of the larger community and broader interests represented in even the most niche social media sites. Choose articles to submit that will have broad appeal to this audience even if it means not sharing every single post. Consider writing posts that will appeal to your new social media audience and think of them as part of your wider audience.

Bring your own community. Don’t rely on a social media site to deliver all of your traffic. Efforts to merely siphon off the larger community’s audience will be seen for what it is and your blog is likely to be treated accordingly. Instead, encourage your regular readers to join the new social media site you are submitting to if they are not members already and promote the social media site on your blog to your community as well.

Participate, participate, participate.Just as you would never want to simply write blog post after blog post without spending anytime reaching out, commenting on or linking to other bloggers in an effort to bring them into the conversation, so it’s important to take part in the social media community you have joined beyond simply posting a blog post and not returning until it’s time to post again. What are others in your social media networking saying and what can you add to the conversation?

Share other stuff too.Don’t just share your own blog posts on the social media sites where you participate. In some social media communities it can even be considered bad form to post nothing but your own articles. Share other resources of interest you’ve found around the Web just as you do on your blog. If others find what you’ve shared interesting, they’ll be sure to follow your profile link back to your blog and have a look…and perhaps share some of your posts as well.

Hope you’ve found thesed tips helpful. Blogging can be a powerful way of sharing your ideas and linking your blog to social media communities can help you grow your blog community and traffic dramatically. Happy socializing and happy blogging!

(Shawn Hessinger is chief moderator and blogger for BizSugar.com, a social media site providing news and information to the online small business community. For more on BizSugar community how to submit your own small business content to the group, check out our “about” page or visit our BizSugar signup page to create your free account today.)