If you are writing blog posts for business, remember this simple rule – RED or DEAD
Search engine optimisation is a key service of ours, and in our travels we come across thousands of blogs and social media presences that are being used as just another way of getting up the search engine rankings. All this content is being created for the search engine spiders, with little thought as to how valuable it is to web users. It is true that making frequent posts, promoted through social media channels will attract the search engine spiders to return to your site more regularly. Optimise that content and it’s highly likely you’ll see an upwards shift in your rankings. It might be a good strategy for bringing people in, but is it enough to keep them?
Whilst high search engine rankings are important for the businesses that we deal with, developing a long term brand is much more important.
To maintain a brand, customers and potential customers need to be engaged. So here is the simple RED or Dead rule to remember each time you make a post:
Keep your posts RED or DEAD.
• Relevant
• Engaging (educational)
• Different
If your post doesn’t meet all three of these criteria, then don’t bother posting it – just kill it.
So much of the social media content we see from businesses doesn’t meet our criteria. Before posting ask yourself.
Is this relevant?
Know your audience and what they want. Don’t waste their time or it’s unlikely they’ll keep coming back for more. As an example, we’re an online marketing agency for ambitious businesses, our clients and potential clients want to know all about how to use the latest online marketing techniques to help them grow and market their businesses better. They don’t want to know what we had for breakfast, who made the tea last, or what we are up to this weekend. However, if we’ve read something interesting over breakfast or had a great marketing insight whilst on the last tea run, it might be worth them reading about it.
Is it engaging or educational?
Engagement is a bit of current social media buzz word, and swapping it out with educational can be a better guide. Is what you are writing going to educate your audience, so they finish the post understanding more than when they started? Using the law of reciprocity if you give something of perceived value away, it is likely that the recipient will feel a debt of gratitude to you. That might just be letting someone else know about your post by linking to it from their own blog post or tweet. Which in SEO terms, is a good way of saying thank you.
Is it different?
If you’re just going to regurgitate someone else’s post, or rewrite the same post as a couple of weeks ago with a few different words, why are you bothering? It might fool the search engines, but it’ll just bore your readers, and hopefully keeping your real readers coming back for more is even more important to you than the search engine spiders.
So a nice simple rule when it comes to social media for business – keep it RED or Dead. If you can create frequent Relevant, Educational and Different posts pushing them out via the myriad of social media channels, you’ll be much more likely to achieve the true goal of effective social media for business, a growing and engaged audience of the right readers.
