When I spoke about Facebook marketing strategies at SMX East, someone asked the panel of speakers this question: “If you had to do only one to help your business, would you start a blog or focus on social networking?” The answer, I feel, is not necessarily a black or white issue. Obviously, if you can handle running a blog and social networking, the easy answer is “both,” but there are situations where one is more suitable than the other.

Why You Should Blog

Adding a blog to your site can be beneficial to your business in a multitude of ways, a few of which I’ll highlight below:

• It builds unique content. By posting new entries on a regular basis (daily, weekly, etc), you’re creating new, unique content for your site. You’ll get more pages indexed, meaning popular posts can pull in some good search traffic and other posts can rank for long tail search terms.
• It’s a great launchpad for linkbait and viral content. If you’re developing linkbait or viral content for your site, a blog is a great, easy way for you to launch the content. Deploying a piece of content via an active blog makes it seem less orchestrated/intentional than if you were to set up a separate page just for a list.
• It’s a good brand builder. Giving your company a voice via the blog can make your business stand out among the competition. If you provide really helpful information and stand out as an industry leader, your blog will become a valuable resource. Also, establishing a personality on the blog will create emotional ties to the reader and you can develop positive relationships with your audience (which can lead to sales!). You can also use the blog to address any reputation management issues and share company news with the public.

Why You Should Do Social Networking

One drawback to blogging is that it is time consuming. If you can’t devote the time to blog on a regular basis or if you don’t have the writing ability to crank out an interesting blog post, you could turn to social networking. While social networking can also be extremely time consuming if done properly and consistently, at its most basic level it still has some benefits:

• You can rank various profiles for your company name. Social networking can be great for reputation management — if you build profiles on strong domains like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, you can get those profiles to rank for your name in addition to your company website, thus taking up more real estate in the SERPs and potentially pushing down any negative mentions/results (check out KnowEm to register your business profile across multiple social sites).
• You don’t necessarily have to be creative to participate. While blogging often requires you to put on your thinking cap and come up with interesting topics to write about, social networking isn’t quite as demanding. Many sites (like Facebook and Twitter) involve having short conversations with each other (in the form of wall posts or 140 character tweets), so you don’t have to spend time researching ideas for posts. Of course, very successful accounts get more involved (sharing links, offering tips, etc), but if you just want to be active, it’s quite easy to do so socially.
• You don’t have to do anything on your website. If you’re taking the DIY approach and don’t know how to install a blog on your site or can’t build something custom, or if your site can’t handle large amounts of traffic, or whatever the reason, you can turn to social networking and not have to worry about hosting and all that other nonsense. By using other platforms to get in touch with your audience, you’re able to focus on more pertinent issues for your website, like improving the checkout process, testing landing pages, addressing dupe content, and so on. (Of course, a more savvy social media marketer will integrate social elements on his/her site via widgets/RSS/share buttons/etc.)

Why You Should Do Both

Obviously, if you can do both, absolutely blog and participate in social networking. You’ll reap great benefits from both strategies, and if you’re successful in one arena, it’s not very hard to incorporate the other. You can blog about starting a new social account and your first impressions, hold contests or release news on the blog and share it via social media and social networks, spread blog posts using your accounts — the list goes on and on. Marketing has evolved thanks to the Internet, and if you’re not evolving your strategies as well, you’re likely going to fail as your audience moves forward while your business stays frozen in time.

Why You Should Do Neither

If you can’t do it right, don’t do it at all.  Don’t join a thousand social media sites just because everyone else is, and don’t start a blog because it’s what everyone else is doing. If you don’t have anyone on staff who has decent writing abilities and can devote the time required to maintain a blog and interact with the readers via comments and feedback, you shouldn’t start a blog and just let it sit there and gather dust. The same goes for social networking and social media in general– if you’re going to start a bunch of profiles and then do nothing with them, it’s almost worse than not joining in the first place. Make sure you’re doing these things for the right reasons and that they make sense for your business — don’t just hop on the bandwagon and expect the money to come pouring in.