Right Mind Creative

I have noticed a counter-productive trend beginning to take shape in my community and area, and it has to do with social media.

Here in rural Alberta the majority of the population are often slower to adopt new technology, especially when it comes to social media. Recently, Twitter has really taken off here (about a year after it appeared on the local news), and people are really starting to connect the dots and realize the potential all this social media stuff has.

In the rush to adopt Twitter and Facebook, something was missed, the humble blog. First lets focus on what businesses are doing right. The majority have a website; that’s the first step. They have signed up for twitter and Facebook, and are building up friends and promoting themselves quite successfully.

Now, here is what unknowing business people (and the candidates running in out local election) have done wrong: All of a sudden there is traffic going to your websites and a buzz is building. Upon visiting the website, users quickly realize the site is static and it hasn’t changed much since the last time they were there. Another scenario is that the website owner wants to communicate more in-depth than Twitter or Facebook will allow. As a solution the website owner, having heard of “this blogging stuff” from a friend, thinks it is a good way to solve their problem. And it is. The part they get wrong is creating a free blog on WordPress’ site or Google’s Blogger, now you are directing traffic away from your original site, and a myriad of other things not conducive to your Google rank, SEO and branding. That’s not good, especially when you’re already paying for your own domain name (www.yourwebesite.com) somewhere else.

So what’s a person to do? Simple, host your blog on your existing website. Keep all your visitors on your site, eliminate having to re-enter content in more than one place, and maintain your branding and company identity. Adding a blog to an existing site will be a long-term money saver by reducing your online marketing efforts and the time spent managing multiple websites.

Remember, blogs are social media too, it’s not just Twitter and Facebook. They can connect with more people than twitter (not everyone is updating their status every hour), and are much more likely to inspire debate.