B2B Web Strategy Blog – eMagine

Among social media, blogging is “Still the One” for B2Bs

December 21st, 2009 Posted by: Bill Gadless

In all the hoopla over Twitter, Facebook and the rest, it can be easy to forget the grand-daddy of all social media tools:  your corporate blog.  And as Newt Barrett reminds us in his post on Content Marketing Today, it’s still the most important social media vehicle for most B2Bs, by a wide margin.

Newt backs this up with a number of solid reasons:

• Both to ensure that your website can be found by Google et al. (SEO), and to position your company as thought leaders, you need to develop a wealth of online content.  With its powerful yet free or inexpensive tools, blogging makes this task simple.
• Over time, your blog will provide your prospects with a virtually unlimited… reservoir of information …forever, and all in one place.  And by segmenting the information into “categories”, you enable your visitors to find exactly what they want with minimal effort.
• While social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn are members-only societies, your blog is open to the entire world …enabling you to achieve potentially infinite reach for your critical mass of content.
• It lets you be both timely and comprehensive.  Twitter couldn’t be more timely, but those tiny tweets are anything but comprehensive.  And your blogposts can be integrated with even deeper information, like your website and its white papers.
• Your blog posts can be automatically pulled into great social sites such as Facebook and Twitter, thus letting those powerhouses enhance your online presence every time you post to your blog.  Three for the price of one …not bad!

We might add that a blog helps to humanize your company, enabling an informality and personal touch that’s typically not appropriate on your website;  and prospects these days can be suspicious of companies that seem unable to unbend.

So, what’s not to like?  If your B2B isn’t blogging yet, it really ought to be.  And don’t forget to encourage dialogue (responses to your posts):  that’s what makes it social.

Entry Filed under: B2B Web Strategy