17 Feb 2011

Is a blog still important in 2011? @jowyang answers Your question

Your website and your blog is the central communications hub for your message, ideas and communication. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are only more means to get traffic to your site and expose more people to your company, your mission, your voice and engage with them, after you wrote something. You have to deliver relevance content and "Feed the Beast" - a play on words, as all the connections with the Interwebs are handled via feeds and apis... Share you knowledge and you will be ahead of the curve and much more visible to the world, then 90% of your competition.
And Blog engines, self-hosted or shared hosted have the best features to "Feed the Beast". And you can measure, what is the current interest of your growing readership. Measure it, not to get frustrated but to focus your topics more to your audience. Google Analytics helps a great deal and it's free.

A common mistake people make is that people live in a “field of dreams” world whereby they think that simply blogging about a subject will make people come and visit. Blogging is great for telling prospects about what you are selling but it does not bring people to your site.

In fact a blog is a focal point and acts as a base of operations for communications. Even though you may use Twitter and Facebook there still needs to be landing point – a place that people end up when they click on the link.

What’s more a blog can also address questions or concerns your audience find important. By all means people use amplification tools like Twitter and Facebook to draw their attention to your blog post, but the thoughts reside in one place.

SEO is also vital. New, focussed and relevant content will always be picked up by Google which will in turn bring extra traffic. It is here where the second stage of engagement takes place – directly on the blog. This is often more in-depth and focussed than through other channels like Twitter. How often have we all felt that 140 characters is not enough to give a detailed opinion. Facebook too has its limitations – even though you can write as much as you like, many find lengthy wall posts unappealing – it really is a case of the right message for the right channel.

Read more at technobabble2dot0.wordpress.com

21 Jan 2011

Follow-up #SBRN event tonight: How To Write a Blog That Others Will Want to Read

For those starting out or thinking about blogging, you probably have a few ideas, but you also need to look into the future, 2 - 3 times a week blogging that 100 - 150 Blog posts per year... An all should be relevant to your audience? Phew, seems like a taunting task... You know how to eat an elephant? Right? Once bite at a time or one blog post at a time;-)

Amplify’d from socialmediatoday.com
Wisdom aside, in an attempt to give you a generous dose of inspiration, I thought that I’d purvey my own thoughts with regards to what makes a good blog that people will remember, re-post, retweet and, most importantly, return to again and again.
Read more at socialmediatoday.com

20 Jan 2011

10 Reason Why Facebook Page, rather than Profile @Larrybrauner

Somehow, a set of businesses and nonprofits got it all mixed up and created Facebook Profiles, instead of Facebook Pages.
The heavy-weights reasons: #1 - #2 - #6 - #7 - #10

Here are 10 reasons to use a Facebook business page for business instead of a Facebook personal profile:

  1. Facebook members who wish to follow your business will typically feel less comfortable adding you as friend and opening their private lives to you than merely connecting with your Facebook business page by “liking” it.
  2. In addition, Facebook has created barriers to adding strangers as friends, as I explained in 3 Key Social Media and Web Marketing Strategies for 2011: Good-Bye Facebook Open Networking.
  3. Mixing business and pleasure on Facebook personal profiles is often complicated.
  4. Because of these limitations, Facebook personal profiles will not grow virally, but Facebook business pages might.
  5. Facebook personal profile friends are limited to 5,000, but there is no limit on the number of Facebook business page fans.
  6. Facebook business-page content can be indexed by the search engines, but Facebook personal-profile content cannot. Facebook business pages can make use of search engines and SEO.
  7. There can be multiple Facebook business page administrators, and their identities will be shielded from visitors and fans. This feature offers Facebook business page administrators flexibility and some degree of privacy.
  8. Facebook business pages support applications and tabs. Personal page application tabs have gone away.
  9. Facebook business page administrators can send updates to fans. Some, not all, of the fans will actually read them, but this feature still has value.
  10. Facebook business pages come equipped by Facebook with a set of analytic tools called Facebook Insights.
Read more at online-social-networking.com

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paulisystems Birgit Pauli-Haack