So your company has committed itself to tapping into the opportunities of social media marketing, and you've been put in charge of the company blog. Congratulations! But now you're faced with the challenge of creating content that will attract readers, engage them in conversation and cultivate a persistent and positive relationship with them.
It must have looked like an incredible idea and a tremendous opportunity for you at the time but now that you have to go and execute you're faced with the responsibility of dishing out content that's interesting enough to keep people coming back, but for branding/marketing purposes you have to bring your company into the story somehow.
What in the world do you write about?
Here are some ideas you can explore to get you started. Some of these can be further spun off and elaborated on, and all of them are potential conversation pieces that aim to encourage a response from your readers.
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How customers can get the most from your customer service department
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What can your customers do if they would like to recommend improvements to your products
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Letters from customers: actual suggestions from customers on how you can improve
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Impressive things your competitors are doing - and how you'll get even better than they are
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Your growth plans for the next X years
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The commitments you've honored and the promises you've kept
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What makes you unique (you can end this piece with a question: "Do you agree?")
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What you've learned from ______ (This will be an analysis of a recent company or product failure, or a customer relationship snafu, with an accompanying discussion of the lessons learned from it)
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The values you stand for, and how your products and services show this
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What is it like to work for your company?
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Current events in your industry and how this affects your company
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Customer focus: How customers use your products and how your products help these customers
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Why didn't we think of that? How customers modify your products and find novel ways to use them
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Ask people to twitter a question, to which you provide answers
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Tell people what's really cool about how you use your social media tools - Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
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Share your company's history
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Myths about your products, company or industry
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What keeps you up at night?
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Tell a story (or make it a couple of stories) about your company What do customers need to consider when selecting products similar to yours, and what makes you different from the rest, and the best fit for the customers' needs
There should be at least a couple of ideas from this list that you can use and build on. But if you'd rather roll your own set of topics, the good news is that there's no shortage of things you can write about, nor sources of inspiration. When you've got deadlines looming and the muse of corporate blogging is too busy processing back-orders, here are some ways you can generate ideas to use for your corporate blog.
- Compile the latest information about your industry.
- Invite guest authors - colleagues in the company, vendors, industry thought leaders, customers, etc.
- Check your mail, customer complaint desks, etc. and compile a list of questions you can answer.
- Express your opinions on controversial topics in your industry.
- Think beyond text; just because a blank blog page begs to be written on doesn't mean you're constrained to text content. Scan through YouTube videos, relevant infographics, DocStoc or Scribd documents, white papers, audio files and other content formats you can embed in or link to your blog. You can then write a commentary about it.
When you've built up your content pool you can begin broadcasting your messages using Isis Toolbox social media marketing tools. These tools allow you to shedule your posts, post from RSS and more, so you can get your content to the largest possible social media audience within the shortest amount of time.