Blogs: the most human communication in the company

Written by Fernando Maciá

The great boom experienced by social networks in recent years has meant that the validity of the true precursor of the Web 2.0 model – the blog – as a channel for interaction between companies and target audiences is now being questioned. Faced with the urgent need for any company to rationalize resources, it could be questioned whether or not to continue to maintain a corporate blog when the great mass of users spend more and more time on social networks.

Nothing, however, could be further from the truth: company blogs are still in good health and there are many reasons to support their full validity as a complementary channel in the corporate 2.0 strategy, along with the traditional Web site and corporate social profiles.

If on its Web site the company has the opportunity to present and sell itself, its blog is a perfect space to explain itself and generate knowledge, while social networks are environments that facilitate active listening to users’ opinions, customer service and conversation with them on an equal footing.

Compared to other online marketing strategies, blogging has some specific advantages that are worth noting.

Your blog is yours

As long as you continue to pay for the domain and hosting, nothing and no one can stop you from continuing to attract traffic, incorporate comments and generate leads. There are no changes to the blog usage policy other than those you wish to impose, and it is up to you to control comments through stricter or more permissive moderation. You select the topics, the periodicity of publication, the possibility or not of commenting…

Take advantage of a blog’s ability to naturally attract visitors to redirect those visits to your conversion pages. For example, if you publish a product usage guide, a recipe or an application example, make sure to integrate on the same page the product, ingredient or solution mentioned in the post through links in the post itself or a “Related Products” section in a side column.

Ease of customization

A blog, on the other hand, can be customized in virtually every aspect: you can include your brand wherever and as big as you want. You decide the colors, where the photographs, illustrations and videos appear, the design style, text fonts, etc. to adapt to your company’s corporate image and the profile of your users. You can also integrate links – internal or external – wherever and however you want.

A blog is essentially a very text-rich environment, which in no way limits your ability to integrate attractive photographs or illustrations. There are excellent royalty-free or very inexpensive illustrations that you can use. On the other hand, if you prefer photographs, my recommendation is to avoid stock images and opt for authentic photos of your facilities, personnel, products, etc. This increases the feeling of authenticity, closeness and credibility that a blog should instill.

A blog is a very profitable long-term investment.

A post written today will continue to produce traffic and inbound links to your domain months – and even years – after it is published.

Compared to the ephemeral life of content on some social networks, a blog is a very profitable investment in online visibility that will continue to generate benefits – in the form of visits, links and leads – for your own domain in the short, medium and long term.

Be aware: whether you like it or not, the content you publish on your blog will be plagiarized sooner or later. Be sure to include a credit line where it is clear the authorship of the post and a link to your domain with the anchortextin which you want to appear positioned in search engines. Also, be sure to include in every post two or three links to other contents of your Web siteThe links must be absolute (i.e. they must contain the full address of the referenced URL) so that even if they are published on another domain, the links still point to your Web page.

Use Google Alerts to discover plagiarists who did not include the credit line when republishing a post and send them a polite email asking them to include it with the respective link or remove the post. A high percentage of them will agree to do so.

The blog promotes closer interaction

Unlike the cold and impersonal texts of a corporate Web site, a blog encourages the establishment of communication between the company and the user on a more personal level.

The posts are signed by a person with first and last names. And the reader who decides to leave a comment and receives a response perceives this contact with the author in a very close way. The communication style is more open, direct and personal. A blog is an ideal space to interact with customers, gather their opinions, generate brand recognition and encourage engagement.

As the author of the blog, reply and thank you for the answers. Manage trolls and offensive comments. And it attracts visitors from other blogs by participating as a commentator on them. You can also promote the contents through RSS or by publishing a newsletter to which your readers can subscribe.

The architecture of a blog favors visibility in search engines

Content published in a blog-like structure generally ranks better than content published on a traditional Web site for several reasons:

• A blog is a Web site with a naturally high proportion of text.
• The content of the blog is constantly changing and refreshing.
• The contents already published are updated frequently thanks to the incorporation of new comments in each post.
• The
  comments enrich the contents
  with the words and expressions that users usually use in their searches.
• The structured architecture around content categories and tags allows for enormous flexibility in grouping content around keywords with high search potential.
• The code of blogs is usually very structured, as are their page addresses, with semantic URLs that search engines value positively.

Identify for which searches for which you would like to appear there is not enough relevant content on your website and write a post using related keywords. Application examples, user guides, tips, explanations, tutorials, etc. work very well. Do not forget to use interrogative formulas in the titles of your posts: how to protect my home, how to decorate my baby’s room…

A blog is a repository of viral content.

If you can generate content that especially resonates with the interest of many users, it is very likely that the recommendations of the content will turn it into a viral phenomenon.

Humorous or shocking videos, infographics, results of studies or surveys, etc. are particularly conducive to generating a viral reaction in users.

Include the buttons of the main social networks to make it as easy as possible for your blog visitors to share or recommend your content through their social profiles. The +1 buttons of Google, Facebook and Twitter are mandatory. There are plug-ins to integrate this functionality in any blog in a very simple way.

A blog is linkable

The contents of a blog, because they are not overtly commercial, naturally and spontaneously generate more inbound links than an e-commerce or corporate website. Visitors to a blog who find interesting content tend to recommend it through their social networks, re-post it on their own blogs, save it in favorites or social bookmarks, share it…

To help your domain benefit as much as possible from the popularity that a blog naturally generates, I recommend that you host your blog in a subdirectory of your domain, rather than in a separate domain.

A blog is easy to maintain and expand

Finally, one of the greatest advantages of a blog is its maintenance interface, which is very intuitive and easy to maintain even for people who have no programming skills.

Its flexible format, on the other hand, allows the integration of text content, photographs, video, presentations…

This favors the decentralization of content generation and allows several people to contribute jointly to the maintenance of the blog, enriching it with more varied topics, styles and perspectives.

Find out which experts in your company are good at expressing themselves clearly in writing and encourage them to publish.

Put a blog in your company

Company blogs do not replace the corporate Web site in the same way that the communication that the company develops through the social networks in which it participates does not replace the blog either.

Each environment has its specific peculiarities and while the corporate Web is usually quite rigid in terms of architecture and style, the blog is, on the contrary, flexible, somewhat more informal and much more approachable.

It is the perfect place to generate user-oriented content that we can then amplify through the various social networks that act as a “sounding board” for the blog. As we have seen, to take advantage of its full potential, the blog must be aligned not only with the company’s communication strategy but also with the rest of the marketing mix tools: SEO, social networks, corporate website, e-mail marketing…

We have pointed out some of the differential advantages that we notice in blogs. Would you like to complement the ones we have mentioned?