This segment of online marketing includes business promotion through social networks. It starts with creating social media profiles, and then it includes many social media marketing techniques, such as content promotion and engagement, hosting competitions and giveaways, interaction with the social media users, social media advertising, etc.
Blogging is sometimes defined as a part of social media marketing. The reason for this statement relies on the fact that blogging provides more dynamic content than website pages. It also encourages the interaction between the author and the readers.
Both of these, regular updates and online interaction are the characteristics of social networking websites. Hence the reasoning that considers blogging as additional channel used for social media marketing.
In terms of social media marketing, blogging is a strategy that creates content to be used for social promotion. While a lot of content shared on social networks will be created for the specific social network, a certain part of content shared will include blog links. There are several reasons why companies do so:
#1 Diversify content shared on social networks
Sharing blog content provides more material for the users, offering a variety of content the users would find helpful. Unlike social media status updates, blog content is longer and more elaborate, so the online users can find more information about the topic they are interested in.
#2 Improve content distribution
Without social media reach, blogging would mostly depend on organic traffic and inbound links. However, employing social networks for content distribution helps with delivering your blog content to the audience following you on social networks. This increases the reach and visibility of your blog content among the online users.
Sharing on social networks increases the visibility of blog content as you have all those social media users that you can potentially reach. Furthermore, the influence of social networks on search engine visibility has been a topic of many debates among marketers. There is no clear data on how the search engines see social media links, but there is a common belief that search engines do see these links in some way. Additionally, social media links are often featured in the search engine result pages, which means that it is possible to increase visibility, especially for branded keywords.
#4 Get traffic
Social networks help you bring traffic to your blog. The amount of that traffic can range anywhere from a couple of clicks to thousands of social media visits, but what it mainly depends on is the how popular your social media accounts are and how viral your post is.
#5 Interact with social media users
Growing popularity and adoption of social networks among the people worldwide have led to more opportunities to interact with them through these platforms. For a business, this represents a chance to improve the business-to-customer relationship, to provide customer support and to ask for reviews. For people, social networks represent a convenient way to follow the news about the business they are interested in (including promotions, new product releases, etc.), as well as an opportunity to get their questions answered, to provide feedback, etc.
