No one cares about you – they care about how you can solve their problems. Write for your readers.
These two expressions epitomize the most important marketing (and social media) concept: relevance. How often have you seen a post, picture, tweet, or comment that adds zero value? Or where the signal-to-noise ratio is, well, noisy?
When it comes to using social media as a professional tool, there is a subtle shift that must happen. Instead of a self (or corporate) focus, the post must be designed to be user-relevant, and user-focused. It’s true that celebrities (and politicians) often break this rule, but they would do better if they were more relevant.
Social relevance isn’t rocket science – here are five tips that can help:
- Define the primary and secondary audience for your Facebook and Twitter updates, tweets, videos, and blogs.
- Define the overall goal and the high level messaging that you need each audience to adopt.
- Brainstorm on the key information needs of the target audiences. And if you’re not sure, ask. The intersection of this and your goal/messaging should define your overall theme.
- Brainstorm specific post topics within this theme.
- Seek to engage, not just broadcast. A great barometer of relevance is the degree of engagement. If there are no shares, likes, or comments, your post may not have hit the mark.
This week’s action plan: What’s your signal-to-noise ratio? This week, review all of your social posts, using this five-point checklist as your criteria. (Are the posts really written for a targeted audience? Does it appear that there is an underlying goal? Are the topic choices important to the audience? And on a similar theme? Is there engagement?) If the posts are too wide-ranging and diffuse, then start writing for your reader: they will care about you once you begin solving their problems.
Competitive insight: Reviewing your competitor’s social posts can often give you insight to their marketing strategy: reverse engineering what they have been saying, provides visibility to their priorities and goals.
Postscript: Read the last 30 (or 300) posts of mine at www.RandallCraig.com: What is my signal-to-noise ratio?
Note: The Make It Happen Tipsheet is also available by email. Go to www.RandallCraig.com to register.
Randall Craig
PS: My firm now publishes a no-spam high-value monthly newsletter, the one-o-eight. It’s filled with more content and news you can use. To subscribe, fill in the form here.
@RandallCraig (follow me)
www.RandallCraig.com
www.108ideaspace.com
www.ProfessionallySpeakingTV.com
by RandallCraig on January 25, 2013
Filed in: Blog, Blogging, Make It Happen Tipsheet, Promotion, Social Media
Tagged as: Blog traffic, Blogs, Connection, Engagement, Promotion, Social Media, Writing
Have you ever been disappointed with the engagement level of your blog? Have you decided that this year something “better happen”, to make it all worthwhile? If so, you’re not alone. Here are 17 ways drive more users to your blog, and increase their engagement with it:
- Write great content. If you write poorly, or have uninteresting, uninsightful posts, people will never return.
- Focus your topic. You will attract a more loyal following if your topic is keyed to your target audience.
- Be consistent. Write using the same style, length, posting frequency, and posting date/time.
- Be controversial. Very few people are interested in commenting on a dry (or vanilla) post.
- Move beyond words. Embed pictures and video within the blog itself. It looks more interesting, and research shows that people are more apt to read a post with picture(s).
- Team blogs. Sharing a blog with a colleague is a great way to generate some variety. It also means that two people are promoting the blog. A secondary benefit is that each team member can respond (like/share/comment), providing an “instant” base level of activity.
- Tweet a value-added Headline. If there really is value in the Tweet, then it will be retweeted. And it will draw people to your blog
- Use your email list. Send an email talking about the post with an intriguing click-through link. Send a direct message to your LinkedIn and Facebook contacts as well.
- User your groups. Post a summary of the blog in relevant LinkedIn groups. If you post in irrelevant ones, you’ll get instant disengagement – and worse.
- Auto-syndicate. Connect your blog to LinkedIn and Facebook, so that your blog appears on your profiles. Users will participate on those platforms directly, as well as on your blog.
- Empower others to syndicate. At the bottom of every post, let people syndicate the content through to their favourite social sites. (AddThis.com and ShareThis.com)
- Hold a contest. Nothing like a little competition to drive activity.
- Share your stage: Ask others to be a guest blogger, taking your spot from time to time. They’ll pull their readers with them, exposing yourself to a completely new set of people.
- Share others’ stages. Ask to be a guest blogger on someone else’s blog. You will pull these new readers back to your blog, if you are relevant enough.
- Connection/integration with overall marketing plan. The blog – and all social initiatives – shouldn’t stand alone, but should be integrated with all of your other marketing activities to achieve a specific goal.
- Improve your Search Engine Ranking. Ensure that people can find your blog when they search for it, by ensuring that each post contains the right mix of keywords.
- Ask for comments. Don’t end your post with a conclusion – ask your readers what they think, what their experience has been, or whether they agree.
This week’s action item: Beyond the obvious of improving the engagement level on your own blog, this week, respond to this post with one or two ideas of how to improve social engagement.
The Make It Happen Tipsheet is also available by email. Go to www.RandallCraig.com to register.
Randall Craig
@RandallCraig (follow me)
www.RandallCraig.com
www.108ideaspace.com
www.ProfessionallySpeakingTV.com
