Transforming Your Blog to a Thriving Online Community through Social Engagement

Businesses everywhere now understand the importance of maintaining an active blog – blogging serves as a medium for brand marketing and online promotion. But that’s not all. Far more importantly, a good blog can help a business create and nurture an organic online following and social community.

Why is this so important?

The benefits for businesses are multi-faceted:

• Social engagement helps businesses connect with real people and build an organic following that likes, respects, and approves of their brand 

• The direct positive impact on the immediate group of people that identify with the brand through the blog is also transferred to their own personal connections, so there is a brand awareness multiplier effect of several degrees:

• There is increased traffic to the brand websites through internal linking in the blog, creating more visibility for products and services and more sales

Blog-based social engagement is a viable marketing strategy for any business

Now let’s see how to setup a social engagement strategy.

How to Setup a Social Engagement Strategy: 8 Steps

The most common ways to setup a viable social engagement strategy include:

1.      Write Engaging Posts

The first step is naturally to write engaging posts that actually make people want to comment. These posts would have useful information and an interesting perspective that will make people want to express their opinions.

2.     Comment Generation

Actually placing comments on your own post to get a discussion started. People will visit the post and will be more likely to comment if they are not the first to do so.

3.     Comment Management

Trying to stir things up by replying other people’s comments, starting debates, and so on.

4.     Internal Linking in Blog Posts

This will generate traffic to client pages and help increase sales.

5.     Internal Linking through Comments

Actually replying comments with links to internal pages will boost traffic to those pages (and any they link to) when the comment section is very active.

6.     Posting & Sharing Blog Articles on Social Media

This is the most direct way to generate blog readership and traffic. Posting blog article links to Twitter, Facebook and others can dramatically improve blog readership, and if people like what they see, they’ll keep coming back.

7.     Post Links to Blog Articles on Other Blogs (comments)

Sometimes it’s possible to visit other blogs and post links back to your own blog.

8.    Write Articles on Other Blogs Linking to Client Blog

This is commonly done through a guest posting arrangement or just posting an article to a blog and linking to your client’s blog.

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