Sharing Your Industry Expertise to Develop Your Social Media Profile
Social media has become the focus of most online marketing campaigns in recent years as the allure of the 1 billion users and the cheap advertising have built it into a bone fide marketing tool. It is generally considered that the most effective way to use social media marketing is to blog on your niche topics and support those posts with social networking on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. The most common difficulty for people that want to use this marketing method for their business is that they don’t know how to create the quality content that is needed to keep a blog running. Often they don’t believe that they have anything to write that would generate enough interest to attract readers to their website but the opposite is generally true.
Most blogs have a specific topic or niche that is covered in the content. This can be anything from following a celebrity to blogging on technical subjects but the thing that most blogs have in common is that they are niche focused. Business blogs are another example of this and because these companies are often the ones that are offering the state of the art products and services in their niche they are also the ones with the greatest industrial expertise in their specific areas. It is this knowledge and experience that generates the most valuable content whether it is used to create a long blog post or to add a suggestive and helpful comment to a Facebook thread. Joining online groups and forums in your niche specifically for the purpose of contributing advice to other members is an excellent way to establish your level of expertise in your industry’s online conversation. If your advice is sound and your offered solutions are effective, members of those forums will naturally look to your website for more answers in future.
For people that don’t already write a lot composing blog posts can be an odious chore but if you begin with a simple plan for creating content it can be made much easier. Of course one real advantage of having industry expertise to share is that it provides topics to write about and no matter how dull you may think they are, for someone who needs that information they are very interesting. It is a good idea to watch the online conversation in your niche that happening on sites like Facebook or one of the LinkedIn groups to help to choose exactly which topics are likely to be the most engaging at any given time.
Blog posts don’t have to be very long but they do have to be informative. Long posts are much harder to read and more likely to lose the reader before they get to the buy now button at the bottom. The best length for most blogs is about 300-500 words with a couple of images to break the text into more readable portions. Keep the posts simple and say everything that is required to explain the topic fully and to display your expertise on the subject matter. Focus on writing about your specific areas of original knowledge and make sure to include a call to action at the end to make sure that it is easy for people to find you and your business. The more regularly that you make even short posts the greater your online presence will become and it will be more likely that you will take a more dominant position in the SERPs for your niche which will further enhance your expert status. Your industry experience and knowledge in your niche could well be the best online marketing tool at your disposal and exploiting it is easier than you think.
