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Social Media Analytics and Engagement For Bloggers

Recently, I wrote an article about how bloggers can use personal branding to make more money blogging. The crux of the article was that bloggers are great writers but we aren’t often very good businesspeople.

I think the same is true for public relations. Bloggers focus so much on their writing that a lot of us neglect the PR side of being a blogger. The result is that you may have a blog with good content and it might even be well-aimed at your readership (writers are taught to “know your audience” and this overlaps with the marketing concept of targeting your demographic) but you still aren’t getting much traffic to your blog, and thus aren’t making much money off advertising.

Social media monitoring

Social media monitoring suites, such as Alerti (a snappy social media monitoring tool with an iPhone app), aren’t originally intended to be used by bloggers, they can still help you increase your readership and make connections with other bloggers:

Know what other bloggers are writing about

There are a finite amount of readers in each niche and each of them can only read so many blogs per day, so if they find one that’s better aimed at them than yours then they might leave your blog for someone else’s. You might have a friendly working relationship with other bloggers in your niche and you might share tips and suggestions with them at blogger conferences, but when push comes to shove they’re your competitors. Social media tracking tools let you see which articles are being talked about on websites like Twitter and Facebook, and provide you with useful feedback like analytics. This lets you see what your competitors are writing about and which sub-niches they’re aiming at. You can then know what to write about (or what not to write about) to better target your niche. Plus, if you write content that people will post on their Facebook profile, you’ll get exposure to their friends and family, many of whom have similar interests and might become regular readers as a result of their friend reposting your article.

Sharing what you write

While you have to post your articles yourself on your own Facebook profile, social media monitoring tools allow you to figure out who’s sharing your articles with their friends. This lets you figure out what types of articles your readers really like: Two articles could have the roughly the same amount of pageviews, but articles that are “meh” don’t get reposted on social media. By knowing what your readers repost, you can write better content for them that caters more to their likes and interests. This increases the value of your blog by giving you a more easily targetable readership. Furthermore, you can know what social networks your readers use, and focus on that network to communicate with them. Lastly, you’ll get a better idea of not just your current demographics but also your future demographics. If you see that a lot of people from the same demographic are reposting your articles, they’ll draw in their friends who are usually of a similar demographic. This lets you grow your blog’s advertising revenue by aiming ads at your readers based on their interests and demographics, not just interests like many blogs.

This is a guest post by Murray Newlands. Murray is the CEO and Founder of Influence People, an online marketing and PR firm based in San Francisco.

Image Credit: Josh Hallett / Creative Commons 2.0