Clients often ask me exactly why in the world they need a blog. The blog is the fundamental building block for all of your social media content. Building relationships with people through social networks is primarily done by sharing content: educational information, topics, information that’s relevant to your target audience.
The blog is the hub of all your social media content. You can import your blog into your social networks or simply take snippets of your blog articles to post it in social networks with a link back to your blog.
In addition to being the building block for your social media presence, there are many benefits of having a blog. A growing number of businesses even use their blog as their primary website (called a blogsite). Here are a few of the benefits of a blog:
1. Easy to Use. With a blog as your website, you don’t have to be held hostage by your webmaster every time you need to make a change to your site. You can easily update your site yourself using the WordPress platform dashboard. You don’t need to have any special technical knowledge. Using WordPress is no more complicated than writing a document in Microsoft Word.
2. SEO. Blogs are very search engine friendly. Search engines like Google like blogs because they are dynamic sites in which the content is updated regularly. That means that users are getting new information from your site all the time.
3. Creating Community. Because users of blogs have the ability to post comments to blog posts, it’s easy to build a community of followers. Rich discussions can take place through blog comments.
4. Easy Web Stats. You can easily add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog, which provides detailed statistics on how many people are visiting your blog, what links they click on and more.
5. Sharing Posts. WordPress provides widgets that will give readers the ability to share your posts on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Your content gets shared and a viral effect is created from people sharing your posts with others in their networks.
Want to know more about creating a blog using WordPress? Check out the Social Media Bootcamp web course starting on June 29, 2011 at http://www.thesocialmediamarketingbootcamp.com.