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 âknow your audienceâ 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 âmehâ 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
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About Murray Newlands
Great post Murray, I’m sure many of our readers have thought little about things like social media monitoring as bloggers but it could be very important. I believe social media is just getting started and it’s not something we want to play catch-up with later on. Getting the most from everything we do is key to success and social media is no exception.
I agree with you Brian, Social Media is one big thing that every blogger should consider.
It’s surprising how many don’t utilise the power that Social Media has, if it’s there and it’s free, then why not make the most of it 😉
Karen, some companies’ target markets don’t use social media so it’s not worth the time it takes to maintain a presence on social media. Also, it looks really bad to create a page on Facebook and then abandon it after a few months, which is all too common.
However, I think most companies should still create a social media presence, at the very least so that they show up on Google Local.
Everything revolves around social media these days, any type of promotion campaign needs to be involved with social media.
yes social media is most important to promote our blogs or products.
Murray Newlands rightly pointed out the importance of social media marketing. It is getting so popular that I have seen people mostly reading content which is endorsed by others. This way they think that the recommended content has some value in it. Thanks for a nice post. Cheers
Yeah, people frequently trust things posted by their friends because they see their friends (unlike advertisers) as trust agents.
Hey Murray,
Learning what your competitors are writing about is a great tip to gain more followers for your blog. Increasing your readership and making connections with other bloggers are important for success and social media helps you do both.
Nice article Murray. I’ve talked about ROI but not about seeing what other bloggers might be talking about. Then again, since I follow so many bloggers and thus see their titles, indirectly I am seeing what they’re writing about, though it wouldn’t hurt to have visuals to take a look at.
Social media monitoring tool are very useful for the bloggers like me to get to know more about what our readers likes and dislikes are. It will prove beneficial for the selecting the appropriate topic for the articles. I have never used Alerti’s tool any time but I have heard about its social media monitoring tool. It seems to be very useful for the bloggers. It will help in increasing the readers for the blogs as they will be getting the required useful information to read.
Social media is one big asset in getting good traffic and Pr to our site and it is also a standard method in SEO services we get many information’s and at the same time good traffic to our site ..
This all is definitely true! When we have an opportunity to follow or have any information about all our articles’ reposts, then we will be able to find out readers’ preferences and interests and work further in this direction
Social Media is going to dominate the search engines and specially Google Plus so I will suggest to all the bloggers and SEOs, Not to Miss social media.
It already does! Look up a company name, and you’ll see its Facebook, profile, Twitter profile, and other social media profiles on the first page! 😀
It is essential for bloggers to give readers some uniqueness and creativity in the posts. Only then the readers will be attached to blogs. But for this bloggers need to know what are the reader’s likes are. And for this monitoring of the social media is very important. Today more than half of the population uses social networking sites. These sites are the best resource for getting reader’s likes and dislikes. By monitoring these one can accordingly write articles and win reader’s heart.
Hi Murray,
Yes, today is socia media is important, but I wonder if we will follow as many facebook and twitter in the future, it is written so much and we do not have time to read everything.
Facebook recently started showing posts on people’s profiles that interest them, so posts by their Facebook friends that use keywords they like, are posted by people whose profiles they frequently view, pictures involving many friends, etc.
Hi,
I like your writing on Social Media Analytics and Engagement For Bloggers. Its very helpful for my business as I want to traffic my site on Google. Keep such writing.
Thanks
Social media took PR to a whole new level and it’s important that we don’t get left behind.
that’s one of the main reasons i read a lot of blogs like this one on a daily basis.
Thanks for the article. Social media something I’ve been getting into more over the past 12 months, as it’s definitely an important part of internet marketing.
Everything revolves around social media these days, more than half of the population uses social networking sites. great post on Social Media Analytics and Engagement For Bloggers
I agree, that Social media tracking tools are very helpful to identify your target audience and to improve the quality of the content.
Probably, thatâs the best way to find your own niche.
great advice. its important to have all the necessary social media data all in one place, otherwise it’s impossible to keep up unless blogging is your full time job.
These are really important points that you make. Social media is really important and it is very nice to have everything together right in one place.
The main goal of the blogging is to deliver your vision to the target audience! Fortunately, we have social media tools to control, analyze and effect the efficiency of the blog!
I’d find it best to advertise through Facebook ads and bring targeted traffic to my website. Twitter is also nice since people can easily find you thanks to hashtags.
Very well said. of course there are a lot of similar niche bloggers. We should know what others are writing. And Social Media, it’s the best tool for bloggers.
Hi Murray
When I started my blog I had no idea that I was also going to be using a lot of time on social media. I thought that I could just focus on my own blog and make it great then people would come by them self. I got smarter 🙂 When I started using Twitter I thought it was only about me and my blog, again I got smarter and started sharing other peoples stuff that I found interesting. Then it began to be fun because I got in touch with other bloggers that learned me a lot. Today I think that I use more time on Social Media that I do on my blog. Maybe I use too much time on Social media, but I have found it very powerful and a bit addictive to 🙂
That’s great, Thomas. So you use Twitter to both share articles (yours and other people’s) and to interact with your readers?
When it comes to exposure, Social media is the best platform.Being it a blog/product/service, network like Facebook, twitter etc provides you your niche audience and helps to get some reliable customer. These type of monitoring tools plays an important role while running such campaign.They
provides an insight on your traffic, your best blog , the information people are interested in etc.
Great post Murray! today bloggers need not only the ability to write good and informative post but they also have to learn how to create rapport in the community to promote readership in their blog.
A good article. Many bloggers think little about social media monitoring. But it is an important factor. Social media has really started in a big way. Benefiting the most from the things we do is the key to our success, social media included.
I agree these points. As a blogger writing the good post is not important but also have to learn how to expose our post is the important. So Social media is the best platform to expose our post.