From business owners to in-house marketers, the use of both social media and blog content on your website can be a highly effective way of getting your brand, services, or products out there. Fortunately, these two approaches don’t have to be created entirely independent of each other. In fact, they shouldn’t be!
Let’s get into why these two channels should be friends, not strangers, before we tell you how. Because yes, we’re going to tell you how so you can try it out for yourself. We’re cool like that.
Why create strategies that align?
First and foremost, creating your plans with the intention of weaving them together means you create a unified front to your audience. With the same blood flowing through both, you’ll create a familiarity that audiences trust. If you want to make yourself famous for something, from selling the best cakes to offering the best legal services, then you want to ensure every channel you’re marketing yourself on speaks the same story, same message, same voice. Intertwining strategies helps you achieve this.
Second, and this one is a game-changer, is that a cohesive, properly-aligned strategy will save you a serious amount of hours and energy. While the approach does need to be different because they’re for different platforms and consumption styles, they can be created to feed into each other to save you time when it comes to content creation (we’ll get into the how for this later).
Finally, another big reason to align your content creation approach for both spaces is that social content can appear in search results. Want the best chance possible to appear on search engine result pages with a specific topic you’re exploring? Create a blog post and a social post or posts about it that all tie together. An example could be a how-to guide to cleaning mirrors without streaks on your blog, and a how-to video on your YouTube channel. Both of these will have the chance to appear for searchers, so why wouldn’t you create both? Especially when one can be made using the information from the other (there’s that time saving we mentioned).
Okay, we’ve covered why you should be creating your social and blog content strategies with the intention of aligning. Now, let’s get into the how.
HOW: Study your audience engagement
You can align your approach here by using your social media engagement as a real-time testing ground for your long-form blog topics and future social posts.
You should be creating content your audiences want to see, so what could be better than using them as your source of inspiration? The way they engage can be used in many different ways to your benefit as a marketer.
Ask yourself these questions about your audiences:
What are they and aren’t they engaging with? Look for patterns and identify what succeeds and what doesn’t, then use that in part to guide your future blog and social posts. If it’s clear they respond best to a certain style of post, such as carousels of text graphics on socials and listicle-style pieces on blogs, then incorporate more of them into your content. Look for topic popularity, too. Are there certain areas of your business that, when touched upon in posts, people respond better to? Explore whether there is something more you can do with those more popular topics (but don’t just abandon the rest!).
What comments are they leaving? Really listening to your audience is important, and you can do this by reading their comments. If they’re asking further questions, whether on your social posts or blog posts, consider if they could be answered through content. Combined helpful, in-depth blog posts with easily-digestible social posts to answer your customers or potential clients. These forms of content should feed into each other: highlight key blog post points on socials, and point social users to the blog for more detailed answers.
Another use of comments is to look at what kind of language is being used. What words are your customers or clients repeating? This can help you create a word bank of relatable language that can then be used in long-form content that feels more personal to the reader.
Have we asked them what they want? We believe there’s no shame in asking. Social media polls, Q&As, and asking customers to leave comments with questions can offer an abundance of inspiration for future blog and social content. You can ask them anything, from “what would you like to see more of?” to “what’s your biggest challenge with X?” – any answers have the potential to help you strengthen your strategy or produce more desired content.
HOW: Pay attention to news and trends
Keep those peepers peeled for what’s going on out there and align your content by letting real-time social trends dictate what you should be writing about on your blog right now. Staying up to date on what is important or trending within the communities you are trying to reach can help more than you might realise.
HOW: Cross-promote content
Instead of keeping your followers in one place, use your social posts to walk them over to your blog, and vice versa.
Just as you likely promote your brand, products, or services throughout your blog and social posts, you can do the same with your accounts and platforms. Prompt people to follow your social media accounts in your blog posts for more regular content, and prompt people to read your longer, in-depth content from your socials, where there is an opportunity for them to get more value by doing so.
If done well with a combined strategy, you can tie the topics of all your posts together, enabling a much smoother journey between the two. In a blog post about the best cake decorating techniques, encourage people to head to your Instagram to see upcoming instructional videos. In the captions of those instructional videos, tell people to visit your blog to read the specific details of each technique and the products you’ll need. Use a combined strategy to promote a story made whole across multiple platforms.
It’s a good idea to create specific blog posts for promoting your blog posts, too. Whether this is a carousel of graphics or a single image or text graphic, this is the kind of post that could be shared by your social media followers with their own followers. This gives your blog posts the chance to travel in more ways than just through search engines via your SEO strategy.
HOW: Repurpose blog content for social media posts
Instead of staring at a blank screen, wondering what to post on Instagram or Facebook, just use your latest blog post as a cheat sheet for future social content.
One blog post has the power to fuel several social media posts. Make a series of carousel posts for Instagram or LinkedIn using key highlights from your latest blog post, or create videos of someone from your team talking through those points. Play around with your posts and find what works best to get points from your blog posts out there.
Use your heavily researched blog posts as quick access inspiration for socials, and then direct your audiences back to the blog post to read it in full. Save time by falling back on your blog posts as part of your social strategy instead of consistently coming up with social content from scratch.
Struggling to successfully combine strategies?
Juggling the inspiration, creation, and management of both a website’s blog and your social media accounts can be a struggle when you’ve got a thousand other things going on.
That’s where we come in.
As experts in all kinds of content and its successful management, we’re pretty well equipped to handle yours. We’ll work with you and your ideas to create detailed strategies for your socials and your website’s blog, ensuring all the while that they can run not just alongside each other, but intertwine when beneficial. And, if you fancy it, we’ll create that content for you, from flying drones over your work sites to researching and writing in-depth long-form content pieces that signal you as thought leaders in your industry.
Go have a look at our copywriting, social media management, and content creation pages, then get in touch to talk about what we can do to make your life easier.