A genuinely interesting blog, updated frequently, is central to almost any successful social media marketing strategy. Your blog is the place where anyone can learn about your company, your industry, your products, services, and mission. Providing great content attracts, keeps, and expands your audience. When your blog is shared by your audience with their own friends and followers, you’re doing it right. Ideally, your blog will also entice them to visit your full website and become your customer or client.

However, one impediment prevents some companies from taking full advantage of the opportunities a blog offers. The content that many businesses produce is not what prospective customers want or need. It’s focused back on the company, and like a company newsletter, it may interest employees and their friends, but not outsiders.

If you want to introduce a new product on your blog and brag about its features, that’s fine occasionally, but your principal focus must be on your readers, their needs, questions, concerns, and lives. These are just a sampling of the kinds of topics your blog posts should address:

  • How to Write a Living Will
  • How to Have a DUI Conviction Expunged
  • How Wine (or Whisky or Vodka) Is Made
  • Tips for Sleeping Better and Having More Energy
  • How to Spruce Up a Home Before Putting It Up For Sale
  • How to Apply for Social Security Disability Benefits

Posts about your company picnic or your move to a new location are simply not going to be shared or attract readers to your full website. Your blog is more like a magazine than a legal document or a textbook. Break up big blocks of text. Short paragraphs are better. Keep your text under 600 words whenever possible; 500 is better. Use graphics, bullet points, sidebars, and links.

Consider how the best magazines and websites deliver content; learn from the pros. If you’re not the world’s most creative person, don’t hesitate to hire a freelance writer or a social media marketing firm to create fresh, interesting, consumer-oriented content on your behalf. As a central element in your social media marketing strategy, your blog simply must be consistently interesting and effective.