What Is Social Blogging and Should You Be Doing It?
In the early days of digital content creation, the best way to get your name and work out on the internet was to start a blog. Having a blog is still a helpful tool to grab organic traffic online. But starting one from scratch requires extra work and effort to grow your audience and keep them around. Social blogging helps combine the benefits of a blog with a pre-curated and interested audience to get eyes on your pieces and grow your readership. Today, we’re covering topics like:
- What Is Social Blogging?
- Social Blogging vs. Legacy Blogging
- Social Blogging vs. Social Media
- Why Should I Start Social Blogging?
- 7 Tips To Grow Your Social Blog
- Social Blogging Sites
What Is Social Blogging?
Social blogging, sometimes called microblogging, is a subsection of regular blogging that uses posts with shorter word counts and more media. Hallmarks of social blogs include:
- Short sentences
- Single images
- Links
- Videos
- Infographics
- GIFs
- Audio clips
Social blogs are shorter and more media-driven because of people’s changing attention spans. Different studies from the last few years claim our attention spans dropped from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to 8 seconds today. Other sources tried to disprove this exact number. The actual number doesn’t really matter. What does matter is people enjoy the ease and convenience of shorter content because it’s more approachable.
Marketers use social blogging for most of the same purposes as social media channels. They share information about news, events, and timely or relevant topics. They also address themes that matter to their target audience. Social blogs let you share information in real-time, a feature they have in common with social media.
Social Blogging vs. Legacy Blogging
Social blogging has differences from traditional or legacy blogging, including:
Ownership
With legacy blogs, most times, you own the little space of the internet you’ve claimed. You pay the yearly or monthly fee for the space and your domain. You also own the content you create and share on your blog. A lot of marketers find this feature important. They care about the customization of the blog site and space. They also have full autonomy to write about topics of their choice with little or no restrictions. With social blogging, you may be subject to the host site’s rules and guidelines, like terms of service, a character count, or design format.
If you plan on social blogging for your company, try to claim the same social handle across all the networks you plan on posting on. It’s actually a good habit to claim your handle on platforms you don’t plan on growing, if only to prevent someone else from making one and posting content your business wouldn’t approve.
Consumption Habits
Legacy blogs typically allow readers to view just one piece of blog content at a time. This is because when you open a traditional blog article, you’re within a single page. With social blogging, depending on the length of the content and the format of the site, you can look at many pieces at once, or in more rapid succession. Feed-based services make this even easier. Social blogs often contain shorter content, making it easier to browse through multiple pieces faster.
This is good news for marketers because it allows you to create series, like several short, yet helpful educational videos in a row that social consumers are able to easily watch with the flick of their thumb.
Direct Communication
When working with a legacy blog, you’re writing to a broad audience on the internet. You have a target audience in mind, but you’re writing to the void. Yes, legacy blogs have features like the comments section that let you better understand the audience who reads your content. But it’s easier with social blogging.
Those platforms show a list of people who follow your content. If you want to learn more about them, simply click and browse their profiles. Social blogs show how they engage with and react to your content. They also allow for communication in real-time. This strengthens the rapport between both parties.
Number of Channels
With a legacy blog, you have one content hub for all your pieces. Even if you syndicate your content, it all links back to one site. With social blogging, you may still have a central content hub or you may conduct different and individual blogging on separate platforms. For example, you might do social blogging on both Twitter and Instagram, sharing similar content but making each one its own unique stream.
Remember to evaluate your potential and target audience on each platform independent of the other. And know that although the audience may actually be the same, their intent for each platform is different. Think about how they use the platform, what content works on there, how you can tell a story for that network, and how your audience absorbs content.
Social Blogging vs Social Media
Social blogging and social media share similar characteristics with minor detail differences, including:
Platforms
There are a lot of crossovers among platforms for social blogging and social media. Many popular social media sites and apps are prime for social blogging, like Twitter, Instagram, and even YouTube. But not every social media platform is a social blogging one and vice versa. For example, you might not use Snapchat for social blogging because you can’t keep a continuous record or stream of your posts. In contrast, you likely wouldn’t use Medium for social media because it’s geared toward articles and longer-form content.
Content Types
You might share similar content on both your social blog and social media feeds. This includes the basics like text posts, images, links, and video clips. The themes of your content may be similar too. Both types use timely or trending topics that provide immediate value to viewers and readers. They’re both good for making announcements, such as previewing upcoming events or talking about awards and special projects related to your brand.
Demographics
While anyone can read a blog or be on social media, social blogging may appeal to a wider demographic reach than social media sites. For example, many types of people work in the technology industry. If your social blog focuses on those topics, no matter where you host it, you can get people from different age brackets or locations.
With social media, there are certain platforms more popular with different age groups, genders, and ethnicities. So while you might post content there, if your audience isn’t a fan of that platform, you may not reach them, even if you’re doing everything else right.
Why Should I Start Social Blogging?
Especially if you already have a legacy blog or conduct marketing on social media, you may wonder how or why social blogging fits into your content marketing strategy. Consider benefits like:
Less Effort
Social blogging allows you to do the parts of blogging you enjoy without dealing with the harder aspects. If you like research, writing, or picking media, you still get to do those things. But you don’t have to do as much of the work to reach out and put your content in front of the right audience. Through the help of tools and algorithms on each social blogging service, you can tag posts or boost them to certain audience segments and get the right people to come to you.
Post Frequency
When you don’t have to put in as much effort to create and share your content, you can make more of it. This increased productivity helps with audience engagement because you’re putting out pieces more often and keeping your brand and name recognition top of mind. When you know how much time you have to create content, it makes it easier to stick to a consistent publishing schedule.
Content Formality
Blogs posts are usually less formal than other types of content. Compare them to articles, white papers, or eBooks. Those types of content are typically informational and instructional and are less casual or conversational. When you add the social aspect to blogging, you can take an even more relaxed tone with your audience. This channel may allow you to share things that are still appropriate but not as strictly professional as with some other marketing channels.
You can reinforce this relaxed tone with the use of GIFs, emojis, short one-liners, or images like memes. Social blogging spaces encourage these elements. If you’re a writer or marketer with a sense of humor, an interest in trends, or even pop culture, using these elements makes it more fun and exciting to create pieces.
At CopyPress, we create all kinds of content for our clients, some that you can use to support your social blogging efforts, and some that are just best for website visits or downloads. If you sign up with us, we’ll work with you to create a style guide that captures your brand voice and style preferences, then you’ll get paired with a team of writers, editors, and QA professionals that will help you create content that will get you noticed.
Mobile Friendliness
Mobile usage accounts for approximately half of the web traffic worldwide. If you’re not optimizing your content for viewing on mobile devices, you’re sabotaging your own marketing. But developers create most social blogging channels with a mobile-first mentality. That means not only do they work on mobile devices but they’re specifically optimized to run there. Many have apps for your devices, so you can use them without even having to enter a web browser.
Trend Following
Because social blogging uses some features of social media, you can capitalize on hashtagging or categorization within the platforms to add your pieces to content collectives. Just as you’d do with a social media post, adding an appropriate hashtag into the description for a social blog post can get it to appear within suggestion feeds, curated updates, or similar lists. This exposes your content to even more people throughout the platform, with the potential to grow your audience.
7 Tips To Grow Your Social Blog
Use these tips to help create and grow your social blog:
1. Use Your Brand Voice
You likely already have a brand voice you use for other kinds of marketing and content. It’s important to keep this tone consistent when social blogging. Even though you can be more casual or even funnier, still make sure you’re choosing words, tones, and topics that people expect from your brand. Consistency is comforting, and it helps your company look professional and organized, even when you’re being casual.
2. Plan a Content Calendar
Even if you’re dealing with the news and trending content, you can plan an outline for a content calendar. This kind of document helps you decide what to share, when, and even where to put it if you do social blogging on multiple platforms. Not everything you share is time-sensitive content, so plan around your trends with other types of posts. Consider creating a shareable document if you have multiple team members who post on your social blog so everyone can see the outline and contribute ideas.
Related: Content Calendar: How To Create One and What To Include
3. Schedule Your Posts
When you can plan your content in advance, you can also schedule it ahead of time. Scheduling your posts through the native platform or a third-party tool can help you hold a consistent publishing schedule without requiring you to be right in front of your device the second something needs to go up. This is especially useful over holiday breaks or vacations and allows you to keep sharing content even when the office is closed.
4. Be An Expert
Chances are, if you’re blogging in a particular niche, you’re an expert in your field or on certain topics. Use that to your advantage. People want information from sources they trust and people who know what they’re talking about. Establishing your credibility through consistent, accurate, and knowledgeable content can make your social blog a trustworthy source of information for your potential customers and clients.
Need help finding the right topics to prove your thought leadership to your audience? Request your free content analysis report from CopyPress. This report compares your content to that of your top three competitors. Then it shows you content gap areas. These are topics your audience is searching for online that have little useful information. You can fill those gaps and become an immediate authority on those topics with your social blog content.
“CopyPress gives us the ability to work with more dealership groups. We are able to provide unique and fresh content for an ever growing customer base. We know that when we need an influx of content to keep our clients ahead of the game in the automotive landscape, CopyPress can handle these requests with ease.”
Kevin Doory
Director of SEO at Auto Revo
5. Share Your Experiences
One of the most enjoyable things about social blogging is that you can combine casual, fun stories and formats with information relevant to your industry and audience. Make it original by conducting an industry-relevant experiment or giving a demo of one of your products, then sharing commentary. This is a good way to create more original content rather than covering the same topics and using the same sources as your competitors.
6. Encourage Feedback
A benefit of social blogging is that most platforms allow for interaction with the audience beyond typical comments and link sharing. Use polls and surveys where you can. Encourage viewers to use the reaction buttons in certain ways to share their feedback. If you’re encouraging feedback, be sure to respond to comments and recognize what your readers have to say. This helps build a community and emotional bonds with your audience and encourages them to come back and engage even more.
7. Generate Backlinks
Social blogging on different platforms helps you generate backlinks to and from your owned content. Backlinks tell search engines like Google that your content is valuable and that other people use them as sources and references for their own content. When you have content on different platforms, you can link to your website or your social profiles through your blog and back again to create these authoritative links and help your search engine optimization (SEO).
Social Blogging Sites
Use this list of social blogging sites to help you find a home for your content:
CopyPress
While content syndication may not sound like social blogging, it can work the same way. With a social blog, you’re going to a third-party website or service to spread your content around where people can see it. Clients who choose CopyPress for their content solutions also have access to our content syndication network.
With content syndication, we take pieces you’ve already created—from blog posts, articles, or eBooks—and increase audience exposure. We do the hard work for you. This is a great complement to a social blog because it allows you to reach people outside of those platforms who may still find your content relevant and informational. Schedule a call with us today to learn how we connect you with the best publishing partners.
Facebook is popular for social blogging because of all the features it offers. You can turn your business page into a continuous feed of blog content. Create posts that include information like:
- Text
- Images
- Surveys
- Polls
- Check-ins
- Virtual cards
- Live videos
- Stories
Facebook also lets you create groups within your audience for more targeted marketing, making sure that the right users see your content. Those who enjoy your posts can like and follow your page to get updates when you share content. Facebook offers many interactive features for users, such as comments, reactions, and sharing.
Instagram is a good place for social blogging if you’re looking to combine words with images or videos. The descriptions for each post cap at 2,200 characters, which gives you more room and flexibility for written content than some other social media platforms.
It’s also a good place to run a social blog that links back to longer-form content by sharing a clip or preview of the longer post and adding a “link in bio” to leave the service to view the full piece. Instagram allows users to follow accounts that interest them and also react through likes, comments, and story shares.
LinkedIn is best known for being a professional social networking site. But its post features also make it great for social blogging in your industry or niche. You can create text posts and slide decks to share information with your followers. This platform also lets you link out to other content from around the internet and pair your pieces with images for maximum interest. LinkedIn users can engage through comments, reactions, and sharing.
Medium
Medium lets anyone create an account to write posts for the site and get their articles exposed to a wide audience. Often, people share their content from other sources here to capitalize on that exposure. This service may be best for content focused on writing rather than media. Medium lets companies get their thought leadership content out on the web without worrying about how or where they’re going to grab the attention of an audience.
Pinterest is a visual-centered platform. Its main purpose is to collect and save information from the internet by pairing a link with an image or video. This helps if you’re trying to create a social blog to complement a legacy blog. You can share links and images of your content on Pinterest to syndicate it, but point users back to your original site.
The interface lets you create boards to group content around similar themes. Users can follow your overall account or individual boards to receive updates. Optimizing your Pins gets them syndicated in discover feeds for more reach. Interactive features include likes, shares, and comments, and ways to mark Pins as “tried” such as for tutorials or how-to content.
Plurk
Plurk is a social blogging platform where users can share a variety of updates through text and other media. Bloggers can upload media files, share links to content off of the site, and engage in conversations with friends and followers. Some features let you send updates to subsets of your friends’ list, which may allow for more targeted content posting.
Reddit is a collection of online forums for people to discuss various topics. It’s organized into subreddit groups around specific topics. Users interact with that content by upvoting and downvoting both comments and posts. Unlike some other platforms, Reddit has a content policy users must follow. Site moderators can change a post’s appearance or content if it doesn’t align with the policy.
Soup.io
Soup.io is a publishing site that caters to sports, television, science, technology, health, and entertainment topics. The company prides itself on sharing news and trending content. You can sign up to share content with the service through the website. Its focus on SEO is popular to help grow your audience. Soup.io’s high domain authority (DA) can help improve your rankings and possibly audience growth.
Tumblr
Tumblr is one of the biggest conglomerate places to do social blogging. You can post nearly any kind of content, including:
- Text
- Conversations
- Audio clips
- Video clips
- Links
- Quotes
- Images
- Animations
- GIFs
Users have the option to curate their dashboards to show topics of interest, pulled from post hashtags. As the blogger, you have the option to customize your blog interface for users. Tumblr’s engagement features include re-blogging and comments.
Twitter is a popular news and conversation social media platform. With a cap of 280 characters per post, you can social blog information in the most succinct way. You can also use Twitter Cards to add additional information like photo galleries, clips, and live links. If you have more to say than the character count allows, simply reply to yourself to create a thread of ongoing content that users can engage with. Remember to use hashtags so that even if someone doesn’t follow you, they may be able to find your content based on their interests.
On Twitter, users follow accounts that interest them to stay informed when a brand updates its social blog. The service also allows interaction with replies, retweets, and likes.
Typeshare
Typeshare is a social blogging platform that acts as a content hub connected to social networks. This service syndicates your content to a variety of sources immediately after publication. Typeshare focuses on what the creators call atomic essays. These are 250-word pieces that center on one idea or topic and pair with an image. The service also provides analytics to help improve your content strategy.
Social blogging has all the best benefits of writing your own blog and writing for social media put together. You can use social blogging to showcase your written work while letting your host site help you with distribution, reach, and analytics.
CopyPress writer
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