Creating great blog content that’s optimized for visibility on the search engines is the first step to having a successful business blog. However, this is just one tactic to follow when building your audience. Another tactic to follow is making sure your business blog is optimized for social media.
Below are three ways to optimize your business blog for social media.
Make It Easy for People to Subscribe to Your Business Blog
When someone arrives at your blog and likes what they read, they will want to be updated the next time you publish a new blog posting. There are two options people can use to be notified.
1) They can subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed which is a stripped down version of your blog that only contains article headings and content that they can read in an RSS reader.
2) They can choose to receive new blog postings via email.
Both methods are designed to fit into a person’s typical online behavior so they don’t have to keep checking your blog to see if you have posted a new article. Now, any time you post something new, your subscribers will be able to view your content without having to visit your site.
Feedburner is a free online tool that’s designed to help you manage and promote your blog. It helps with your RSS feed as well as your email subscribers to your blog.
Add Social Sharing Buttons to Your Business Blog
Social sharing buttons give your readers the ability to share your blog posting on the social networks and social bookmarking sites. After you create a new blog posting, you can use these buttons to prime the pump and alert these sites that you’ve created a new posting. Readers of your blog posting will be able to submit as well, if they think it is a blog posting that’s worth sharing.
The three social networks you’ll want to include in your sharing buttons are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. For the social bookmarking sites, include buttons for Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious.
Not only will this capability make it easy for your audience to share your content, but by distributing your blog posting into these contstantly updating bookmark repositories, the search engines become aware that new content has been added to your site. This practice helps with the rate at which your blog content is indexed.
Encourage Comments on Your Business Blog
Blogs truly come alive when there are reader comments. It’s awesome when there are both lovers and haters discussing their points of view on the topic you posted. To help this process, you should definitely enable commenting on your blog, and you can close each blog posting with a leading question to get your readers to take a stance or provide greater insight or feedback.
As for moderating blog comments, it’s up to you, but I think it’s more effective to have comments appear immediately after they have been posted without moderation. You should still choose to receive an alert whenever a comment is published, and then you can use your judgement on whether to respond or delete. If the comment is relevant to the blog posting, make a thoughtful response to further the conversation. If the comment is spam, then feel free to delete it.
In addition to optimizing for search, optimizing your business blog for social media helps with online visibility and encourages greater participation from your readers.
What else do you do to optimize your business blog for social media?
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All three are great points! I think disabling social sharing and comments, especially if you’re a business, greatly hinders your potential of having a strong online presence. One of the great features about blogging is being able to engage your audience and have them essentially do the marketing for you (by sharing your posts with their network).
Brittany Morse
Online Marketing Specialist | Sprout Social
Absolutely! Blogging and sharing on social networks creates awesome leverage that amplifies traditional word of mouth marketing.