Your business blog is still important. I’ve heard of some people getting rid of their blog/website to focus on Facebook. I find this dangerous. Completely trusting a free, 3rd-party site to be the center or hub of your conversations, thoughts, products and clients is asking for trouble. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to make your blog more social and therefore reap the benefits of social media without handing over the keys to your brand.
Sharing
If you have a blog and do not have a way for readers to share your content with others via Facebook, Twitter, or other social channels and bookmarks you might as well just take it down now. Plugins for blogging platforms such as WordPress, and tools like ShareThis and AddThis make it easy to add this feature to your blog.
Comments/Like
Facebook allows one to use their commenting/replying feature called Comment Box on their blogs. This is phenomenal for blogging! Why? Because, if selected, the post will show on the commentator’s Facebook wall and in their friends’ news feeds. The same goes for “Liking” a post. This helps drive extra traffic to your blog.
Please note that this is different from simply logging into an account to make a comment. That just pulls in your name and photo and maybe a link to your own blog. The social networks that allow user’s comments to post to their social profiles usually ask or provide an opt-in/opt-out to do so.
Auto-posting
You can add plugins to your blog to have it auto-post directly to Facebook and Twitter. Now there is some discussion online about how this can mess up your EdgeRank on Facebook (We’ll talk about that in a future post), but I don’t think this is as big as an issue if you are still manually posting updates and have people engaging with your content. The problem comes from people who exclusively use a 3rd-party platform, such as Hootsuite, to post to profile.
While some would argue that blogging is unimportant or losing its “street cred” social media works hand-in-hand with it to give it fresh life.