Why Blogs and Social Media Work Together So Well

Two very common digital marketing avenues that a lot of MSPs will take is writing blogs to drive website traffic, and using social media to connect with their audience. Both of these methods should definitely be a part of your company’s own MSP marketing strategy, but can be even stronger when combining them together.

Social Media

Your social media is a great place to build relationships with your clients and prospects. If you’re following social media best practices, your company should be posting company culture-related content in conjunction with content designed to drive traffic to your website.

The problem with doing this is that if you’re ONLY sending your social media followers to your service pages whenever your post is related to that service, it’s not typically going to be effective in converting that person. This is because your service pages are focused on the hard sell, and business decision makers aren’t typically in the mindset of making purchases for their business when scrolling through their social media feeds. Unless they’re already about ready to convert due to receiving other marketing materials from you previously, they may immediately bounce from your website if you’re always sending them to a service page (that’s also not good for your SEO!). Eventually after seeing too many posts that do this, they might stop clicking on links to your website altogether.

Blogs

When written with the technology industry and your service offerings in mind, your blogs are great educational content to have on your website. They can help convince prospects that you know enough about the technology industry for them to trust you with their company’s IT, and are a great resource for your current clients to turn to as well.

The issue is that if no one is actually reading your blogs, than they don’t have much benefit outside of improving your website’s SEO. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; many companies will have their own blogs for the sole purpose of improving their search engine ranking. However, you’re wasting their potential if you’re just letting them sit on your website; you could be doing so much more to push potential leads toward your website in hopes of conversion.

The Working Relationship

A synchronous relationship is found when using blogs and social media together. Your company’s blogs and social media posts help to remove the shortcomings that each of these digital marketing pieces has when on their own. Having a company blog provides you with a backlog of educational resources that your target audience may be interested in, and social media provides you the perfect avenue to show them that these resources can be found on your website.

You should be sharing your blog posts on social media if you want to get them in front of your audience. This is why many companies will set things up so that their blog posts are automatically pushed to their social media channels after they go live on their website. This is okay, but you could do better.

If you’re always pushing your blogs in this way, remember that you’re not adding much value to what you are pushing since you’re not including an image or any information about the blog you are linking to. The title of your blog might be enough to hook some people, but you’re going to find that people may start to overlook your blogs over time if you’re sharing them in this way whenever there is a new blog on your website. 

Social Media Blog Post Best Practices

When sharing your blogs through social media, we recommend taking the time to pick an image to go with the post that you are sharing that is eye-catching, related to the blog topic itself and is sized based on social media best practices. This will help your blog post stand out. You should also write a brief sentence or two related to the blog that encourages them to head to that blog to learn more.

By crafting posts like this, you’re encouraging the person viewing your post on social media to actually click on your link to learn more about that topic if they are interested in doing so. This brings you qualified traffic to your website, and can lead to sales down the line.

You can even go a few steps further with your social media blog posts. Additional steps you can take include boosting your posts on the social media platform(s) of your choosing to increase your reach, and use a customized shortened URL to encourage more clicks.

As you can see from the image on the right, we do all of the above for each blog that is published on our website (on top of our daily social media posting), and it helps us see much better results.

Take The Work Out of It All

Social Media as a Service is available to those who subscribe to our Ultimate MSP Blog Service. Through this service, we will push one post per day to your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages (and Instagram too, for an additional fee). We write these posts with your audience and service offerings in mind, and will frequently encourage your followers to head to your website to learn more about what you do by linking to your blog articles, service pages, and other important pages on your website. Contact us to learn more about these two services!