Blogging is a key part of many a social media strategy, but the word ‘Blog’ is so frequently misused in construction.
What a Blog is not
A Blog is not your PR Pieces – you may have a news or press section on your website, but this is not a blog. A blog is not about you, its about your audience.
A Blog is not a series of News Articles – equally whilst journalism produces news articles for mass consumption, a blog is not this either. We are producing for engagement (remember about ‘the conversation’?)
A Blog is not Academic Articles – or other learned writing. Writing for the web is different, and requires different skills. Blog posts don’t have to be comprehensive either.
What is a Blog?
A blog is an online journal, usually written by a person or team of people, targeted at a key audience, designed to engage them. It contains regular, periodic entries known as posts. A blog demonstrates your credibility and expertise in a particular niche topic.
Because blog posts are published online, using a blogging platform developed for the purpose, people can receive your blog in various different ways, and it has to be produced with them in mind. An ecosystem within the internet ‘scrapes’ and shares your blog across the web.
Each blog post is a Social Object, and it’s a great place to publish social objects too. Come to my Strategy Workshop to learn about social objects and why they are so important.
Why Construction should use Blogging
You’ll be familiar with blogs, though you might not know what they are or be able to recognize them. If you look forward to reading what someone writes about a topic, be it fishing or soldering, and you enjoy reading the comments of others on the pages below, and perhaps contributing yourself, you are looking forward to a blogger’s next post.
Brian Green has written an economics blog (coolly called ‘Brickonomics’) for many years. It is now hosted by Building Magazine, but demonstrates many of the characteristics of a classic blog.
Blogging is a key part of a social media strategy because it makes people want to come back and see what you have to say. As an industry full of various grades of nuanced expertise, blogging has huge potential to help the right prospects find you online.
Business Benefits of Blogging
Blogging can help you:
- Demonstrate the credibility of you and your organisation
- Humanise your website and corporate brand
- Create and demonstrate thought leadership
- Introduce clients to other aspects of your work
- Hosted within a website, it brings fresh content (and improved Search Engine Optimisation, helping you be found and increasing return traffic)
- Get you more visitors, inbound links and pageviews ().
Put Blogging to Work
Why do we need to teach our staff to blog properly? Even if you have confident content creators in your team, they may not be the right people to blog. Like other social media platforms, you need the right people to be doing the right things. If your bloggers are the right people, they may not be able to sustain a good blog if they don’t know what is important and what should be discarded.
Blogging is an acquired skill that needs to be learned and honed over time. It isn’t a quick fix. Whilst you can have some easy quick results, real return on investment comes of a prolonged period, which means you need to support your bloggers to not only learn the right skills but be able to develop consistency and find their voice. A good blogger needs to learn how to pace themselves and plug blogging into their work routine.
In house training for your team is available by appointment – please get in touch with your requirements.
If you’re not sure whether blogging should be part of your Social Media Strategy, or you don’t know if you have the right bloggers in mind, read more about how to develop a strategy here.