Best Practices for Blogging

To be perfectly honest, before taking this Social Media class, I wasn’t aware of all these different blogging techniques and practices, especially how powerful tweeting can essentially be. If one wants to be a successful blogger, there are simple practices that should be followed. You don’t necessarily have to follow these practices to the T but they are great ways to improve your style and accumulate more traffic to your social media platforms.

The most important aspect of any blog or tweeting is to keep the reader entertained. You need to grab people’s attention by creating tweets that are exciting, relevant, and help to engage with your followers. If you constantly blog and say the same things over and over, your followers will lose interest and look elsewhere. You essentially want to bring your audience back for more and have people constantly writing comments and/or retweeting your material. When you do notice that your material is being shared by your followers, make it a point to thank them and engage in conversation within their post.

The sport industry does a great job of exhibiting this practice. Athletes love to send tweets that will either cause controversy or will make the audience laugh. A great example of making the audience laugh was with Former Athletics pitcher Brandon McCarthy and now Arizona Diamondback is a well-respected pitcher and extremely likeable person. An incident occurred last year where a line drive struck his head, fracturing his skull. After his surgery and being released by the hospital, McCarthy tweeted:

Second, you should post to social media on a regular schedule and at the right times. I do understand that people have full-time jobs and can’t necessary blog or tweet on a regular schedule every day, but you should be prepared. In the sport industry, most athletes aren’t allowed to tweet or blog right before, during, and after a game so obviously those times are off limits. But taken this into consideration, this leaves a period of time that qualifies as their regular schedule because they aren’t participation in a game or practice.

According to the blog When to Tweet, Blog, Update Status: Social Media Best Practices, the most popular times to be retweeted are between 2pm-5pm and on Fridays and Saturdays, so tweet late in the day and late in the week. As mentioned in the text book The Tao of Twitter, the author makes it’s a point to tweet twice a day and to have them be meaningful. When it comes to Facebook, weekends are best for sharing because of down time and the site being blocked on most of the consumer’s work computers.

Lastly, you should incorporate the author’s pictures so your followers can connect more to what is being discussed. The article, 10 Business Blogging Best Practice, does a great job of discussing this practice. A possible reason to why blogs are created is it creates a sense of a human interaction between each other. If the blog is written by an athlete, it is good to see actual pictures of him/her because it builds a relationship between them and the audience.

Michael Phelps displayed before and after pictures of himself when he grew a mustache. Sure this made people laugh, but it also showed a relationship that he was sharing with his followers on Twitter.

At the end of the day, if you follow these three simple guidelines and practices, blogging/tweeting will be an enjoyable time. Be respectable of everyone and treat others like the way you would like to be treated in return. Keep the reader entertained, tweet and blog on the regular, and show human interaction to your followers. The sport industry has no problem exhibiting this because of all the athletes that are obsessed with social media!

 

Reference:

Adelson, J (@jeffadelsonyan) When to Tweet, Blog, Update Status: Social Media Best Practices. Retrieved from http://www.askingsmarterquestions.com/when-to-tweet-blog-update-status-social-media-best-practices/

Cohen, J (2009). 10 Business Blogging Best Practices. Retrieved from http://socialmediab2b.com/2009/06/business-blogging-best-practices/#ixzz2bCohxGxe

Schaefer, M (2012). The Tao of Twitter. McGraw-Hill

Related articles

• 7 ways to get unfollowed on Twitter (marketituk.wordpress.com)
• Want to Be a Superstar, but No Time for Social Media? Fake it with Ghost Tweeter. (business2community.com)
• CHART OF THE DAY: How To Get More Twitter Followers (embargozone.com)

Social Media Tools

I first want to thank you for checking out my first ever blog written through any form social media and I am eager to hear people’s feedback! The topic of this week is tools used in social media. This is a fitting topic because I find myself to be on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram on a daily basis but just to post pictures and be snoopy (Don’t lie, you do it too!).

Social Media is surrounded by us constantly without us even realizing it. Social Media embraces both web and mobile based technologies that help lend a hand to shared information through communication between businesses, societies and individuals. The article 10 Best Social Media Management Tools gave me a better understanding of the tools used in social media.

Tools such as HootSuite  & SocialFlow   were the two that really stuck out to me because I have actually used both before. HootSuite I would expect for people to have at least heard of but I can’t say the same for SocialFlow.

HootSuite is the more common social media tool of the two and is made for people and businesses to connect across multiple social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. If you have many social media accounts and want to manage them better, this is the tool for you. HootSuite organizes all your accounts in customizable tabs where you can keep track of all your feeds at an easier and faster rate. What’s even better is HootSuite can be purchased for the price of $0! That’s right you heard me, for free!

In addition to HootSuite, another tool used in social media is called SocialFlow. SocialFlow is used to watch live conversations on social media to help forecast the best times for distributing content during the best possible time where your target audience will be present. What a genius idea right? In addition to reaching your target audience, SocialFlow also conducts an analysis of social signals to help identify where people should spend money on supported tweets and posts.

If you had to make a decision on only and you can’t decide, I will make it easier for you; choose both! HootSuite and SocialFlow have joined together to bring HootSuite users the options to connect their SocialFlow account straight to their HootSuite social media management system. This new venture provides fast and easy access between both accounts on essential one dashboard. The purpose of using both HootSuite and SocialFlow is to improve all decisions in regards to publishing to the particular target audience that you want to reach.

I hope I passed my first test of writing a somewhat interesting blog and a topic that I believe I know a great deal about. For the people who did enjoy reading my blog and want to leave any comments or even concerns, please feel free! I look forward to the next few months where I become more comfortable typing my life away and sharing my thoughts to the world to see!