Social Media Do’s & Don’ts for Nonprofit Organizations

  • Your focus should be on selling your personality, your organization and your cause rather then a product.
    • Have a voice and an opinion on things.
    • Don’t word your posts like a sales pitch or a commercial.
  • Have a Plan
    • Ask Questions – how do you want to represent yourself? What 3 words describe the personality of our organization?
    • Set Goals – What do you want to achieve?
    • SWOT Analysis – What are some strengths, weaknesses, opportunites, and threats to what you are about to post or of your organization in general?
    • Target Audience – Who are we trying to reach? Where are they located/what sites do we need to be on to reach them?
    • Communication Objectives – How do we want to communicate this?
  • Engage Your Audience
    • Ask questions.
    • Give them specific #’s to use.
    • Challenge them to do something.
    • Always reply to comments/questions.
  • Show Don’t Tell
    • Use pictures, videos, links…visual media is King!
    • Audiences like it, and it increases the amount of views and clicks your pages gets (based off of Facebook’s formula for who see’s what posts)
    • Be careful of legal issues. Try to only use photos/videos that you have personally taken, watch out for copyrighted music in the background of videos, etc.
  • Consistency is Key – Be consistent, don’t disappear!
    • Time – Make a schedule/calendar and post on a regular basis. Posting regularly increases your SEO (search engine optimization).
    • Voice – Keep a consistent personality/voice to your page. Try to use the same language, abbreviations, style of speaking, etc. to all of your posts.
    • Identity – When it comes to creating new accounts: sync up account/usernames when possible. This makes you much easier to find and easier to tag in posts that go to multiple sites.
  • Be Selective
    • Don’t bite off more then you can chew. More channels isn’t always more beneficial and can be extremely overwhelming.
    • Figure out where your audience is and you’ll understand where you need to be and where you may not need to be.
    • Its better to be very active and consistent on one site then inconsistent on multiple sites.
  • Stay Current
    • Keep up with what’s trending on social media and if you can, include that in your posts.
    • Understand the language, content, & media/apps/social media sites that are relevant.

And last but not least…HAVE FUN WITH IT! 🙂

First Ever Social Media & Social Change Spotlight! (JacksGap)

Wow, where do I even begin?!

Well, if you read my last post you’ll know that I talked a lot about where my inspiration to restart this blog came from. Towards the end of my blog I briefly introduced the person, or persons rather, who ultimately were the ones to spark this desire in me to blog about social media & social change, and they are….JacksGap. That is why for my very first ever “Social Media & Social Change Spotlight” I am going to highlight the amazing efforts of Jack & Finn Harries. 🙂

Now I guess if you are going to understand all the amazing things that they do with their social media power, I should first probably explain how they became so popular. JacksGap is a YouTube channel started by a young British boy by the name of Jack Harries back in July of 2011. Jack originally started the channel as a way to document his gap year to his friends and family. (If you are unaware of what a “gap year” is, let me explain. A gap year, in more recent definitions, is the time in between high school and college when some students decided to skip going right into university and instead take a year off of schooling and traditional work to travel, volunteer, and take courses in other areas of study.)

After the JacksGap channel had been live for a while Jack decide to introduce someone new to his ever growing YouTube fan base, and that was his twin brother Finn! And as they say, the rest is history. JacksGap took off gaining enormous amounts of subscribers, which now top over 3 million!

How on earth did they gain such a large number of fans/subscribers? Well I think their are a couple main reason why they have become so popular among the YouTube community:

1) Their channel has always run on the idea of quality versus quantity. They may not post videos every single week like most popular YouTubers, but you can be assured that every video uploaded to the JacksGap channel is going to be of the utmost quality. High quality video resolution, lighting, editing, and most importantly content. Which leads me to my next point…

2) In more recent years especially the JacksGap channel has been devoted to posting videos with great content including many videos on their various efforts to create social change.They don’t make videos just for the sake of it, they make videos that people actually want to watch and videos that motivate people to be better.

The most recent videos on the JacksGap channel are part of a series they called The Rickshaw Run. The Rickshaw Run is a 4 part video series, with each video lasting about 15 minutes. The series follows the Harries Twins and 5 of their friends as they raced across India in 3 little rickshaws or “tuc tucs”. The boys drove through crazy weather and horrible terrain, met tons of interesting people, learned a lot about Indian culture, and filmed the entire experience to later be shared on YouTube. Not only we’re these videos fun to watch and beautifully filmed, but they were educational and most of all the entire race was part of an effort to raise money for the Teenage Cancer Trust.

After the race was completed the JacksGap team had raised $177,496 for the Teenage Cancer Trust far surpassing their goal of $100,000. And with the completion of this video series on YouTube and many of their other videos, JacksGap have inspired many people all around the world to make a difference just like them, including myself.

This is why I have chosen JacksGap as my very first Social Media & Social Change Spotlight. They have changed so many people’s lives for the better, and I have no doubt they will continue to do so for a long time. They are brilliant filmmakers, rock stars when it comes to social media and all around great roll models for this generation. I hope you enjoyed this weeks post and if you haven’t already I encourage you to go to JacksGaps YouTube channel and watch their Rickshaw Run series. 🙂

My Inspiration…JacksGap

I am currently in my third year at Eastern Michigan University. Personally I don’t really see much of a significance to this statement, but more recently its been brought to my attention that maybe I should. You see, somewhere between the beginning and the end of your junior year of college, apparently you reach some sort of invisible mile marker. Its like all of a sudden everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, starts asking you what your plans are for after you graduate. To me being a junior means I’ve still got another whole year to think about things before I graduate, but to everyone else there seems to be a lot more sense of urgency! To them its more like “OH MY GOSH, you only have 1 year left?!?! I’m assuming you’ve got every detail of the rest of your life planned out by now, so tell me your plans!”…Ok so maybe I’m being a bit dramatic, but honestly at times thats exactly what it feels like, and it kind of freaks me out.

See, I’ve always been the girl that has everything planned out. I know exactly what I want and I probably already have a 10 step plan on how to get there. I knew where I was going to college before my junior year of high school was over, I knew what I was going to major and minor in, and I always thought I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I was going to graduate with a degree in Communications and Marketing after 4 years of college, get a solid career working in my field, get married, have kids, and live happily ever after.

Now although this “perfect life” I had planned out sounds like a pretty good set up, there are a couple big problems with these plans. 1) They’re just plans! there not set in stone and things change as time goes on. 2) I made these plans when I was in high school and I’ve changed A LOT since then! And 3) whether I realized it or not at the time, these were plans that other people had made for me and not necessarily things I wanted. These were expectations placed on me from my family, my teachers, and society. People who had already chosen their paths in life and wanted me to to follow in the same boring cookie cutter paths that they did, and probably their parents, teachers, and society did before them.

Now I’m not trying to bash on all the people in my life who care about me or are concerned for my future, and I’m definitely not trying to say that junior year is this big horrible ball of stress, I’m actually trying to get at something pretty great. You see the GREAT thing about college, is that more then anything you might learn in your classes, you learn A LOT about yourself. You learn independence, responsibility, you gain more life experience, and more then anything you learn what it is that your passionate about or what it is that inspires you…and THIS is where you find out what it is you want to do with the rest of your life.

(Now if you read my blog post from last week you may be thinking at this point “how does this post have anything to do with social media & social change?” and my answer for you is….just hang on a second, I’m getting to that.)

You see, because so many people have been asking me what I plan to do with the rest of my life it’s really been weighing on my mind. And about a week ago in the height of all this stress I had one of those amazing epiphany moments in life. I was sitting in the student center at my school, stressing over papers I had to write, work I needed to do, and internships I needed to look up, when I finally reached my breaking point. I put down my planner, my notes and my textbooks and I got on my laptop. I wanted to just forget about all the stresses of my life, put my headphones in and watch some of my favorite YouTube videos. So I went to my favorite YouTube channel JacksGap…and as I was sitting there laughing and smiling watching their videos about their travels, and their filmmaking, and more importantly their charity work, I realized that the answer was right in front of me all along!

tumblr_mhef1x32RU1rhxoc4o1_400

I want to be JacksGap! Now if you’ve never watched any of JacksGaps videos then you may be saying “Huh?”…So to put more simply, I just want to make a living doing what it is that makes me happy! I want to spend my time blogging and vlogging (video-blogging) about the different events in my life, I want to travel and experience different cultures first hand instead of just reading about them in a textbook or hearing about them on the news, and more importantly I want to do all of this with the intent of creating social change. Basically I want to do something positive with my time and efforts in hopes of leaving this world in better shape then I found it. Now, I may not have the funds to travel the world or the following to create a huge impact, but I’ve gotta start somewhere and that’s what this blog is for me. Being a full time social media advocate for some sort of charity may not be the most realistic dream, and it’s probably not the answer most of my family and friends would want to hear in response to their questions, but it’s what I’m passionate about and to me just realizing that has made me so happy.

Now why am I telling you this? Well when I started to write this post I fully intended on just doing a social media & social change spotlight on JacksGap. The reason being: they are the epitome of what it is that I’m trying to write about. They’re brilliant filmmakers, they use their immense influence on social media for so much good, they’ve been my inspiration and my role models for years now, and ultimately they are the reason I decided to restart this blog. But when I started writing I realized that because they’ve had such as great influence on my life, I had sooooooo much to say about them. So I decided to make the JacksGap spotlight a two part blog post! This post is more about “my story” where I got my inspiration for this blog and why JacksGap is really the reason behind it all….and next weeks post will be all about their YouTube channel, their blog, all the success they have had and how they have used that success to really make a difference in the lives of so many people. So check in next week to read part 2 of my JacksGap spotlight, thanks again for reading another extremely long post, and I hope you have an amazing week! 🙂

Blogging for Social Media & Social Change!

To be honest this blog was something I started last Fall as a requirement for a social media class that I was taking in college, and that was it. I had no interest in ever blogging, I hated having to cite my textbook in posts, and I felt like because it was a blog for a class I had to restrain my creativity and couldn’t fully write about what it was I REALLY wanted to write about. So after the class was over, although I no longer hated blogging, I was still pretty glad to be done with all the blogging homework and stopped writing weekly posts. But…I was still pretty proud of my previous blog posts and decided to keep the blog live, just in case I ever got the urge to write again….and boy am I glad I didn’t delete it because well….here I am blogging again! 😛

Over the past two months of being away from this blog I realized something…I actually have a bit of a passion for writing. As you can imagine being a Communications major in college means that I LOVE COMMUNICATING. Whether its in person, over the phone, or online I’ve always had a lot to say. And living in the media crazed world that we do, you could say I’ve never had a shortage of medium in which to share my voice. I often describe myself as being a “social media addict” which means I am constantly plugged in, posting, commenting, retweeting or reblogging posts online and I probably spend an average of 20 hours a week on social media sites already. So you may be asking “Well then why do you feel the need to start blogging again?” and the answer is simple…I realized there’s just something different about blogging.

Blogging doesn’t have a 140 character limit, you can talk about whatever you want, whenever you want, and in whatever voice you want. You can ad videos, pictures, links and gifs and its the one medium of social media that really allows you to get a message out without fear of annoying your friends and family by clogging up their timelines. It’s simply unparalleled and quite frankly under appreciated by most people, including myself!

And I can already hear your next question…”Sooooo, what are you going to write about?” Well if you scroll through my old blog posts you’ll find a pattern, they all revolve around the subject of social media, and most of them revolve around the subject of YouTube in particular. And although my writing style is going to be changing a bit with this blog, the content is going to roughly stay the same. I am still going to be writing about social media and especially YouTube, but I’m going to be specifically focusing on talking about Social Media & Social Change.

My dream and my hope for the future of this blog, is to be a place where I can openly share and discuss various examples of social media efforts and movements I come across, where people are using the power of the internet to evoke a positive change in the world. Everyday we hear stories about cyber-bullying, internet scams, or other examples of the negative effects the internet has had on our society today, and its left a lot of people thinking that the media or the power of the internet is a bad thing or a scary thing. I want to change that! I want people to see all of the great things the internet has done for us. I want to be a platform or an ambassador for all of the amazing people in the world who are using social media to make a difference in their communities and who are doing great things to evoke social change. I want to get their stories out there and pass it on for others to see, and if I can encourage just one more person to start using their power to influence people via social media in a positive way, then this is all going to be worth it!

So if you love “touchy-feely” stories, stories about passionate people making a difference in the world, or just stories about the power of social media influence, then I invite you to join me in this new blogging journey of mine! Feel free to follow the blog, comment on the posts, and share them on your own social media platforms. And if you ever find a great example of someone who is using social media for social change PLEASE share those stories with me because I would absolutely LOVE to check them out!

Thanks so much for reading this incredibly long post, I hope you have an amazing week, and if you want to watch one of the videos that really inspired me to start this blogging project, I will leave you the link to it here! 🙂

 

PR Pros and YouTube Pros…one in the same?

Ok, so going into this week I was actually really excited because there was a specific topic that I wanted to write about….but, this being my last blog post directly for my social media class, I realized that I still needed to write one post about something in our textbook. Seeing as the topic I wanted to talk about didn’t really coincide with any of the recent chapters in our textbook this kind of bummed me out. However after some serious thinking, I finally came up with something kind of close. So here it goes:

In chapter 20 of the textbook Share This: The Social Media Handbook for PR Professionals, it talks about “skilling up for the future” and gives 3 basic areas of expertise or skill sets that the modern day PR professional needs to be successful. Now, I am not studying PR and I have no intention of ever working in the PR profession, so naturally at first I thought there was nothing I needed to really take away from this chapter. Then I looked at it though the lens of (one of my favorite subjects to blog about) YouTube, and I realized that in order to become a successful “YouTuber” these days the 3 qualities that really separate the stars from the amateurs, are the same qualities listed in the book to be a great PR professional. Let me explain.

The three key characteristics the book mentions are: The Storyteller, The Content Creator, and the Technology Enthusiast.

1. The Storyteller – basically means that to succeed in PR you have to be able to tell the story of your brand or your client, you have to have a deep knowledge of the subject matter you’re talking about, and you have to be able to tell your stories through various mediums and channels. Now, if we look at all of the popular YouTubers online today, I think you will notice one thing, the reason so many people get online to watch them each week is because they are all great storytellers! They put their personality into everything they say and tell a story in a way that makes people want to listen, they know exactly what they are talking about and they make content that is super relatable. And, if you follow some of the more popular YouTubers on social media as extensively as I do, you will also notice that they all know exactly how to tailor their messages on social media to their fans/subscribers successfully through various channels.

2. The Content Creator – means that not only do you need to be able to tell a good story, but you also need to know how to make your stories stand out among the crowd. You have to constantly be creating and curating content that makes your audiences want to listen. And just like this applies for PR professionals this is also something that applies to YouTubers. There are hours and hours of video uploaded to YouTube each second. So whats going to make your video stand out from the sea of other videos on the same topic? I’ll tell you, its good, creative, relatable content!

3. Technology Enthusiast – in summary means that you need to be tech/social media savvy and know all the right tools online to get your stories out there. And like I mentioned earlier all of the super successful YouTubers out there today know how to use social media effectively, and are usually some of the first people to drop the news about a new online tool, technology, or social site. Therefore they are usually the ones who have a leg up when it comes to using those new technologies to promote their channels, and grow their “brand” even more.

So in conclusion, I think that if you look at it closely, you will come to realize that what it takes to be a successful YouTuber and a successful PR professional are actually pretty similar. And it makes me wonder, what other commonalities might there be between the two?

Alright, now stepping back away from the textbook, I mentioned in my little intro I originally had another blog post planned, and although I was able to interweave the topic of YouTube/Social Media into the textbook’s more focused chapters on PR, I wasn’t able to talk about what I REALLY wanted. What I originally wanted to talk about this week, was this video that I found on JacksGap (another mega popular YouTuber‘s website) and how amazingly true it is. So I figured since I couldn’t really work this into the content from the text I’d just post it down here for you to watch (if you’d like). And I HIGHLY recommend it! It really is an brilliantly produced little film about social media and I really wanted to plug it in some way into my post. So here you go 🙂

What ThatSoJack has taught me…

Alright so my last couple blog posts have been pretty educational and have directly followed chapters in the textbook Share This: The Social Media Handbook for PR Professionals, and not that I don’t love posting content based on the reading, but I must say its getting a little boring and that’s the last thing I want this blog to become. So I’d say I’m in pretty dyer need of an original random type of post! 😛

So if you’ve been keeping up with this blog so far, you mostly likely have heard about my love…well lets be honest its more on an obsession…with YouTube and the specific YouTubers I subscribe to. So for this week’s post I’m simply going to plug one of the newer YouTubers I’ve subscribed to ThatSoJack‘s latest video which can be seen below.

The reason I wanted to show you that video, isn’t simply because I think ThatSoJack is hilarious (which I do) but because while watching this video earlier this week I realized something pretty huge. So last week I wrote about the new era of online broadcasting, and one of my classmates commented on the post saying how he would never have a desire to sit in front on a camera. This got me thinking, why is it that some people like myself love being on camera and are completely comfortable with the spotlight while many other people are absolutely terrified by it and would never have the desire to do it? Before watching this video I automatically assumed that the people who love being in front of a camera were always the outgoing, talkative, and social types, and that those who shied away from the spotlight were the introvert, quite, antisocial types. But after watching this video I realized that my assumptions were completely off!

If you watch a bunch of ThatSoJack’s other videos or follow him on Twitter you’ll come to see that he describes himself as an awkward, antisocial, internet addict (like he acted out in his video), and according to my assumptions this means he shouldn’t enjoy being in front of a camera, yet he is a very successful YouTuber who makes videos all the time. How does this make sense? Well after thinking about it for a while I realized that this phenomena is based on the same kind of thing we study with cyber bullies. How is it that some punk with a keyboard who is mostly likely very insecure and antisocial themselves is able to have so much confidence saying mean and hurtful things to other people online? They gain their confidence in the fact that when you put yourself out there on the internet you have the ability to hide behind your keyboard and your computer screen, and now in this case your camera lens. The internet gives antisocial people a place to be social and that can be taken to the negative extremes of cyber bullying or on the other hand can be be taken to the positive extremes giving confidence to people to do and try new things that they may have never had the desire to try before, such as online broadcasting.

This mask or wall that the internet is, can give otherwise shy or antisocial people a more comforting feeling about online broadcasting, and I think this is a pretty exciting thing. There are so many people in this world who have interesting and wonderful things to say but haven’t shared them because they weren’t confident enough to speak their mind. But, I think with more and more people becoming comfortable with the internet we will see many others find their voice. And I for one am very excited to hear what they have to say.

A Whole New World….of Broadcasting

Chapter 14 in our lovely textbook Share This: The Social Media Handbook for PR Professionals is entitled “The Future of Broadcast” and honestly there was no way I wasn’t going to blog about this chapter! The reason: this is exactly the type of stuff that’s up my alley of interest. I am a Communications major with hopes of one day landing a career in broadcasting, and I’m also an Electronic Media & Film minor because quite frankly I’m obsessed with media, and video production in particular. So lets just say this chapter was basically tailor made for someone like me.

The basically concept of the chapter is about how the world of broadcasting has seen a drastic change lately, making a transition from more traditional outlets to online broadcast coverage. Now we’ve all seen how much this online and social media age has changed many different careers. For some it may become more challenging, and for others like broadcasting, its great! There are so many different benefits to online broadcasting and I’m going to name a few of the major ones for you now:

1. Although TV and radio have the ability to reach a mass audience, filming, producing, editing and broadcasting these types of programs takes lots of time and money. Filming and editing a short YouTube video or recording a short podcast, containing the same content, most of the time takes up way less time and money.

2. Most people now-a-days receive their information and new online, so broadcasting online still allows you the opportunity to reach a mass audience, if not an even larger one. Keep in mind a local news channel only reaches a certain area of viewers, but a YouTube video can be viewed globally!

3. For companies who want to broadcast an event or tell a story, instead of going through the traditional news outlets can record their own videos or podcasts this way they have complete control on how the story is told, when its told, etc.

4. Broadcasting content online allows for direct feedback and engagement. Posting a story online allows consumers, fans, viewers, etc. to comment directly on the topic at hand and allows the company, brand or broadcaster to see and interact with what their audience is saying.

5. Posting videos and podcasts online creates more outlets and opportunities for your company/brand to be found, because it considerably helps your SEO (search engine optimization)

And I’m sure the list could go on, but I think you get an idea of how fantastic this shift to online broadcasting can really be. If your company/brand takes the time and effort to put together an online broadcasting strategy, put together quality content, and successfully integrate it into your social media plans, I think you will really start seeing some amazing results. So yes, is a whole new world of broadcasting and it may take some getting used to, but ultimately I think its a pretty cool thing.

carpet

Instagram Ads Are Here

Well it finally happened…Instagram ads are here! Yep that’s right, the popular mobile app (owned by Facebook) introduced early last week the addiction of advertising to the app. Companies or brands will be able to pay to have their photos show up in feeds of people that do or don’t follow them. These photos will show up in the a users feed as a “promoted photo” aka ad and according to a blog post from Instagram, will show users which of their followers like or follow the company and will help brands to grow their follower base. Instagram released this information in an example of a “promoted post” from its own profile on the app and looked like this:

IMG_3264-1IMG_3263

So is this good news or bad news? Well, it depends on how you look at it. If you look at this new feature through the lens of a company or brand, then its great news! More and more companies are joining Instagram and finding success doing so, if you don’t believe me just take a look some of these facts from an article on Broadwayworld.com:

  • 71 percent of the Interbrand 100 use Instagram. This is up from 40 percent in October 2012. While Facebook and Twitter hold steady with 98 percent coverage, Instagram is the fastest growing social network among marketers worldwide.
  • As activity increases, so do followers. 57 percent of top brand marketers are now averaging at least one post per week, up from only 38 percent in Q3 of 2012. As a result, more than one third of top brands have 10,000 followers and 19 percent enjoy audiences that exceed 100,000 followers.
  • Engagement is skyrocketing. Brand engagement has grown by a staggering 350 percent year over year, due in part to a 70 percent increase in brands posting to the visual network.
  • Automotive, media and luxury brands dominate. Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi make up three of the top five most engaging brands. In total, the top ten brands received 83 percent of all Instagram engagement, while accounting for 33 percent of all posts.
  • Photos receive more comments and likes than videos. Like most new features, video adoption has been slow to gain momentum, accounting for only six percent of total posts. Meanwhile photos continue to lead the way, driving 26 percent more engagement than videos.
  • Hashags have become the norm. 83 percent of Instagram posts include at least one hashtag, with 63 of the 65 active brands on Instagram using the new feature. Of interest, top brands use hashtags more sparingly than other brands.

I don’t know about you, but if your a business or a brand, it seems to me that Instagram is the place to be! So as you can see with all this success companies are having on Instagram, adding this new option to pay for a post will only spark even more engagement, and produce even more follows and likes per post, which is great for brands.

Now on the other side of the spectrum are the avid Instagram users, like myself, who don’t use Instagram for work or business but for personal use and fun. And well, quite frankly not too many people are happy about another one of their favorite social media sites becoming tainted with ads. Lets face it we follow certain people on Instagram because we want to see their photos, and in the same way we purposefully don’t follow certain people because we don’t want to see their posts. So I’m not gonna lie when I first saw Instagram’s post on its new terms I wasn’t happy. But I think in reality, we all knew it was just a matter of time.

In the end I think adding ads was a smart decision by Instagram and is a great new feature that businesses and brands should take part in, however I think that if Instagram wants to keep up its reputation and likability as an app they should really monitor the level of quality these “promoted posts” have and the limit the number that will pop up. This way companies will have their benefits, but personal users won’t become annoyed with the app altogether.

Blogging About Blogging

This week I read Chapter 11 in the textbook Share This: The Social Media Handbook for PR Professionals and it was all about the business of blogging. So yes, this week I am going to be blogging…about blogging. Now when it comes to written blogs such as this one I’m still relatively new to the game. I started this blog about 6 weeks ago and although I was pretty hesitant to start blogging, I’ve actually really grown to like it. However a personal blog or individual blog such as this one should be handled and maintained to a different standard then a business blog or company blog should, and that is what this weeks chapter in the text was all about.

Individual blogs usually focus on a particular subject or topic that the author of the blog either has a passion for talking about and sharing with others or has some sort of expertise in the subject and therefore words to offer up on a matter. With individual blogs it is much easier to create a voice or personality behind the writing because there is often just one writer. These types of blogs also often generate pretty sizable audiences because they are not hard to find. The most popular types of blogs searched for are often topics that individual bloggers might talk about.

Business blogs on the other hand are a little different. The purpose of a business blog usually correlates with achieving one or more of these benefits that the book mentions below:

  • Direct engagement – executed well, blogging provides the means to build and engage with an audience in a participative environment around an issue or topic
  • Leadership and social capital – publishing content on an area of expertise either by reporting on events or sharing authoritative comments means that a blogger can quickly become recognized as an expert.
  • Search engine optimization (SEO) – content published regularly using the best practice Web publishing format of a commercial blogger platform is an excellent way of attracting the attention of Google around keywords.
  • Raw Web traffic – blogs can be designed to attract the attention of Google around keywords or social strategies that engage an audience via networks such as Facebook and Twitter to generate traffic.
  • Call to action – posts can include a call to action to prompt the reader to engage directly in a transaction with the blog. You could invite your audience to download an e-book, attend a seminar or buy a product directly.

As you can see there are many benefits that a company can gain from starting a blog. However like the book says “Good commercial blogs are hard to find because of the organizational and communication challenges of the genre.” Company or business blogs are a great tool to use however if a company is looking into starting a blog they should consider a few things first:

1. What do you want your blog to accomplish, what type of content do you want to post?

2. Who is going to run and maintain the blog? PR? Marketing? Communications? Legal? Customer relations?

3. How often are you going to update or post on your blog?

Just like a business should have a social media strategy before jumping in to starting any social media profile, a business should also have a blog strategy before starting a business blog.