How I Use Blogging To Inform My Social Media Strategy

I know I’ve said it before but there’s so much more to blogging than adding a few hundred words a couple of times a month to keep your website updated. Blogs can be a fantastic source for creating social media posts, but they can also inform your entire social media strategy to help you attract and convert more customers.

Here’s how you should be using your blogs to inform your social media strategy

Evaluate the response to your blog

If you don’t have Google Analytics set up for your website, go and do it right now!

If, like me, you don’t have comments enabled on your blogs, there’s only two ways for you to see how well a blog is performing – comments and reactions on social media, and traffic reports from Google.

Social media comments are important because they’re direct feedback from your audience and an indicator of how relevant and valuable the blog has been to them, but social media algorithms can get in the way here. Your posts are likely to be seen by your most engaged followers, particularly on Facebook, and may not appear in anyone else’s timeline. It’s a tiny, tiny sample size to evaluate from.

Google Analytics can give you so much more information, from how many people view your blog, to how long they spend reading it and if they click on those internal links to find out more about you and what you do.

Essentially, the question you’re looking to answer is “is this blog of interest and value to my audience?” and you can tell this by high traffic counts, engagement and interaction.

A high performing blog is perfect social media material

When a blog performs well, it’s because your audience is interested in it and figuring out how to attract interest in social media is important. Take a blog that performs well and break it down into its constituent parts:

• What is about?
• How does it help your audience?
• What form did the blog take? (i.e. listicle, how-to guide, etc)
• How does it tie into your service/product?

When you do this for all of your high performing blogs, you should start to see a theme about the kind of topics that your audience want to read. Compare this to the blogs that haven’t performed well and you should be able to figure out why – perhaps the topic is the same but the blog type is different, for example.

Armed with this list of topics your audience are interested in, you can now create social media posts that they’ll want to see. Use your blogs as inspiration, take quotes from them, make memes, and go a step further with the information you provide, i.e. if you wrote a beginner’s guide to Canva, use social media to drop some advanced tips and tricks.

Make note of the comments and feedback

Wherever it is that your audience are able to provide feedback on your blog, make sure you listen to it. Positive comments are great for knowing you’re on the right track, but were there any opposing views? Are there any questions or comments that need a response?

Can that response take the form of another blog?

Social media and blogging should both inform each other and work as a feedback loop, so while your blogging success should inform the kind of content you share on social media, the comments from social media should also inform the kind of blogs you write (because you will need to expand that list of topics and try new things!)

Often a throwaway comment can spark inspiration for a whole new range of blogs that can help your audience in ways you hadn’t thought of before, so never share your blog on social media and forget about it – always review the response you’re getting.

Remember to update your blogs

When you are sharing your blogs consistently on social media, make sure they’re still up to date.

Industry changes, new research, etc can all make an accurate blog old news, and if you’re still sharing it online this may damage your reputation a little. Review your blogs often to ensure they’re still up to date and relevant to your audience. It’ll help with your SEO ranking too!

I hope you can now see how blogging and social media work hand in hand with each other, and how your blogs should be informing your social media marketing strategy (and vice versa!). If you need help and support with blogging or social media, get in touch with me today for a friendly chat on how I can help!