Bridging the Social Gap: Are Site Blogs Your Missing Link?

One challenge some companies face in social media marketing is how to bridge the gap between stale corporate or e-commerce sites and social networking websites.  What is the link between your site and social networking sites?  How do you get people FROM social sites back TO your corporate site and visa versa?

Some “experts” posit the best solution is to just to slap badges on your homepage saying “Follow us on Twitter” or “Find us on Facebook.”  Or “make sure your site links are on all your social profiles” so people will see your link, click on it and visit you.  These are foundational points, but there’s more to successful social awareness for your company than showing your site visitors where your official socials account are.

The important and missing link  for some marketers may be adding a blog to their main site. Why?

Online social media users are constantly looking for new and fresh content. A site blog provides an opportunity to reach these users with fresh content related to your business.  With ongoing, strong and effective content creation – and sharing of the site blog content into social – you can create a tremendously effective link between your social networking presences and your main company website.

To demonstrate, here’s a graphic:

Site Blog Influence in Social Media (click to enlarge)

Though a blog on a corporate or product site is not a new idea by any means, it’s often overlooked for its added social sharing and conversion value.  If you are not a publisher, you’re simply not producing a lot of content that can be shared in social media.  Blogs provide this platform.  A blog provides an opportunity for visitors from social sites (who saw the content you fed in from your blog) to click back to the blog and then be only one click away from areas on your site where they may convert for product purchase, inquire for service or RFP, or perform another action such as CPC, email sign-up, RSS subscription, etc. And though social is not about selling all the time, all marketers have a responsibility to make their efforts pay off at some point.  Being able to access more opportunities for conversion is a true benefit with blogs.

There are deep considerations as to what type of content goes on a site blog, the technology to use, what the editorial schedule will be and who will contribute, but if you can settle these questions and a few other key strategy issues, a blog can be a fruitful effort and a core link in your social strategy.  It can drive deeper connections to your social profiles, sending traffic from social back to your blog and main site, and can provide greater reach to new audiences in search, social news, other blogs and mainstream press.