No question… aside from being highly addictive, those little 140-character Tweets are just the thing for putting the word out quickly about some nifty new product feature, upcoming tradeshow appearance or favorable analyst review. This has led some people to prophesy that Tweeter’s growing popularity means the end of blogging. Hey, why spill all that ink in a traditional 500-word blog post when you can just “net it out?”
But hold on just a minute. Do you really think you can write a tightly-reasoned rationale about how the buggy-whip industry most especially needs your firm’s solution approach – in a way that demonstrates your thought leadership – in 140 characters? Or a lifetime cost-of-ownership comparison between manual methods and your automated solution? I didn’t think so. But topics of this nature are perfect for your blog, podcast, white papers and other vehicles …but most definitely not for Twitter.
So clearly there’s more than enough room for both Twitter and your blog. In fact, they can work synergistically; if you’ve been following me, you may have noticed that I Tweet the topic of each new post to our blog of late. And we’ve also retooled our blog to contain a mix of newsy, topical posts along with our longer, more educational posts.
Writing in MarketingProfs, Clay McDaniel suggests that every B2B should have a two-pronged blog strategy: posting and monitoring.
- In posting, it’s all about relevance, timeliness and discoverability. Your posts need to deal with topics that your target audience deems relevant; they need to be timely (unless truly timeless); and they should be sprinkled with appropriate keywords that help the search engines find you. And this all needs to be established over a fairly long time horizon; as we’ve said before, the benefits of blogging come fairly slowly, post after post after post.
- With monitoring, it’s all about community engagement. You need to discover what’s being said about your brand “out there”, which research shows is often given greater credence by decision-makers than paid advertisements or other vendor-supplied information. As Clay puts it, “The issue, then, becomes whether you’re listening and responding — thereby demonstrating your commitment to the community that surrounds your business on the Web.”
There’s little if any cost to writing for your blog, using tools to monitor the blogosphere, and participating in the conversation about your brand; but it does take time …so be sure you don’t exceed your team’s available cycles.
Twitter hasn’t killed the blog, any more than the short story has destroyed the novel. They’re different tools for different purposes, and your goal remains the same: knowing which tools are right for the job; and more importantly, how to use both harmoniously to create a lasting relationship with your customers and broader communities online. Your Web marketing consultants can help you fashion a coherent social-media strategy that’s right for your business.
