According to Jeremy Wright, author of Blog Marketing: The Revolutionary Way to Increase Sales, the world of advertisement is changing from transmitting to engaging. Prior to the internet age, most businesses and companies functioned in a “transmission” method, where when they have a new product, they show an advertisement of it, and try to create buzz by displaying SALE! or some form of discounts that will please the customers. However, companies are realizing that engage method of advertisement is far better, in terms of customer satisfaction and company growth. You can broadcast your message, and simultaneously obtain customer feedback. For example, the Microsoft product engineering team are well known for looking at blog feedbacks before making significant changes in their products. So, should you start a blog for your business now? Definitely! And if thats not enough to persuade you to blog, here’s 3 reasons why you should start blogging right about now.

Gives you a voice on the internet

A blog gives your company a voice. It’s a place where you can show your customers what you’re all about. You can honestly share whatever you want, including thoughts, experience, strategies and even some tips and tricks to further promote your product. As you do so, you’re essentially telling the world what the company is capable for outside of the product itself. Those helpful content you produce on a daily basis can build up trust from customers. Trust will turn into leads and traffic, and finally into sales.

The graph above by HubSpot shows the importance of blogging. This method, is said to be “kindergarden content” approach coined by Marcus Sheridan, an influential blogger at Social Media Examiner. He states that, this way of acquiring customers are similar to when kindergarteners trust their teachers — you start to respect and appreciate someone that patiently teach and share knowledge with you. As company’s take this approach, they see and explain things that are otherwise left unclear from the customer’s perspective, and not their own. This is crucial to build customer relationships and gain more sales.

Increase SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, is crucial for your business visibility. Fresh and knowledgeable content is key to beat out your competitors. You don’t have enough profit to have paid keywords by Google? That’s totally fine. Keep blogging on a daily basis, and build your content upon several keywords that you want your company to be found for. For example, if you’re in the fishing business and what to promote your company’s new fishing rod, emphasize the word “fishing rod” with several features, such as “rigid and easy to use”. You don’t necessarily have to actively seek to cram keywords in a single post. If you’re passionate enough, regular blogging about your industry, experience, useful tricks, or customer lifestyle will naturally increase your SEO, which will potentially increase your customers.

Be knowledgable about your surroundings and your competitors

Blogging not only creates buzz and increases your company visibility on the internet, it will also make you an expert on your field of expertise. Firstly, when you write a blog post, you have to be aware and know if the topic you’re writing about is already somewhere on the internet. If it is, you’ll either have to alter your content, or choose a completely different topic to write about. As you do this process, you’ll notice yourself going around many blogs potentially created by your competitors, and eventually understanding their product and what they specialize in. This will make you not only knowledgable about your competitors, but also make you create original content which differentiates from those “cliché” posts. In addition, you’ll also learn to answer and explain things in a way that your customers could easily understand, because searching for content to write about by constantly following the news will make you well educated in the field of your product.

Yes, blogging is time-consuming, but the benefit it brings to your company is immense. So what are you waiting for? Start blogging!

Sources:

Kolowich, L. (2015, April 9). How Often Should Companies Blog? [New Benchmark Data]. Retrieved January 31, 2016, from http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/blogging-frequency-benchmarks

Sheridan, M. (2011, December 02). 5 Reasons Your Business Should Be Blogging : Social Media Examiner. Retrieved January 31, 2016, from http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/5-reasons-your-business-should-be-blogging/

Wright, J. (2006). Blog marketing: The revolutionary new way to increase sales, build your brand, and get exceptional results. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Social media followers are crucial to increase your customers. However, it can be a hassle to think of ways to increase your follower count, especially for start-ups. So, here are three simple yet effective ways to boost engagement and have your twitter follower count go through the roof!

1. Have some personality and utilize online tools

Have some personality in your tweets! The last thing you want to do as a company is to be a robot that spams promotional content every hour. What I mean by this, is to become more creative and show your followers that there’s an actual human being behind the account. This creates a whole new fondness from your followers, and eventually get favorites and retweets which will potentially increase your followers. However, I’m not saying scheduling your tweets should be avoided. There are great social media management tools out there, such as Hootsuite that allows you to seamlessly manage and engage with your followers on social media with one simple dashboard. Click Here to learn more about Hootsuite. In fact, posting regularly will largely increase your visibility, so it’s a crucial factor to increase your follower count.

According to beevolve, a social media analytics company, shows data that backs up the claim, by analyzing 36 million twitter profiles and 28 billion tweets. It’s pretty obvious, I know. But it’s also a fact that people forget about it often.

What I’m saying is, don’t just be tweeting posts about future updates, app features, and so on. It’ll be redundant over time, and honestly followers are expecting more than this. Occasionally post humorous content that’ll make your followers laugh! For example, tweet some popular memes that has some connection with your product. That way, followers will emotionally engage with your content, and the potential to get retweets and favorites will skyrocket.

2. Retweet relevant tweets and articles

Tweeting about your product and your company is certainly important. However, try to search and find influencers that are knowledgeable in your domain, and share those content on your twitter page. According to a study done by researchers at Rutgers University, the way people and corporations use and utilize twitter can be classified to two distinct groups: Meformers and Informers.

Reformers are ones who regularly post social media updates about themselves, and

Informers are ones post updates that are mostly information sharing.

And they found out that informers had two times the followers of meformers. This clearly indicates that you should reach out start sharing and retweeting more content from other influencers that are in your expertise. However, I know it’s a bit time consuming to go through billions of tweets and articles to find the relevant posts. And yes, there’s a great web application for that. It’s called anewstip.com, and it allows you to find relevant media contacts by tweets or news articles with a single click. You can search for any keyword, and it shows what kind of tweets are made by who and it ranks people by influence points. It also sends you alerts when a journalist or a company mentions anything related your keyword in a tweet, once per day for free users. This can be altered to once per hour, but you have to be a paid customer ($49/month). As if that were not enough, the amazing application lets you pitch journalists with personalized messages, so you can directly engage with the influencers about your product for further connections.

3. Freebies and discounts!

Who doesn’t like free stuff? Definitely not me, and probably you too. The infographic below was created by Nielsen, a global consumer and media insight company, for Twitter UK.

As you can see, “To be notified of special offers/promotions” is ranked number two out of 10 reasons why people follow brands on twitter. More than half of the people who follow brands are expecting some kind of discounts exclusive for social media followers. Basically, just give things away. It can be anything small, if consumers see benefit for following the brand, you might see your followers grow.

Sources:

Lee, K. (2014, May 21). Get more followers on Twitter, Facebook, G+, and more: 6 research-backed strategies [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://get-more-blog.bufferapp.com/followers-twitter-facebook-research

Naaman, M., Boase, J. & Lai, C. (2009). Is it really about me? Message content in social awareness streams. In Proc. CSCW’09.