Five tips on how to use blogs for social media community development

• November 08, 2011

By Alexandra Reid

Developing relationships with influential bloggers, and those who comment on their blogs, is an excellent way to develop your online clout and community. While you spend time tweeting and posting status updates to Facebook and LinkedIn, don’t overlook the conversations taking place through the comments section on blog posts about topics that matter to you. Blogs are often where great ideas are born, and commenting on thought provoking posts helps others see you as a thought leader in your space.

However, poorly crafted comments that add no value to the conversation can have the opposite effect, signaling to others that you are a grammatically and/or spelling impaired sheep with nothing new to contribute to your space. Even worse, poorly written comments can be flagged as spam, damaging your reputation and potentially hindering your ability to comment on future posts.

As you develop your social media strategy and build out your online communities, I encourage you to acknowledge and use blogs as effective channels for community engagement. To ensure you leave a lasting and positive impression in the blogosphere, ensure you adhere to these five best practices for using blogs for social media community development:

1) Research and subscribe to relevant blogs before commenting

Finding and developing relationships with influencers in your space first can help you uncover the net of surrounding relationships. Often (but not always), the most influential bloggers will have a thriving community of commenters who contribute regularly to post conversations. It’s important to research the blogs on which you would like to be a regular contributor to discover other regular contributors and their opinions on specific topics. In this way, you can offer a fresh perspective on issues discussed and distinguish yourself as a thought leader.

For example, many blogs discuss different issues around the same topic over a number of posts. Try and pull information from previous posts and apply it to your comments on subsequent posts in a way that furthers the conversation. Better yet, pull information from timely posts from other relevant blogs and use that fresh insight, with attribution, to further the conversation. By subscribing to relevant blogs, you will be kept in the loop on what is being discussed, helping you develop more helpful comments the more you learn. Furthermore, by subscribing to comments on posts themselves, you will be notified when additional comments are made on the post, and those made on your own comments, giving you the opportunity to discuss issues in more depth.

There are a number of ways you can locate influential and relevant blogs:

• Google blogs search
• Blogrolls of other influential bloggers, usually located on the side of the blog’s homepage
• Technorati search
• Blog Catalog search
• Review AllTop
• Review Power150 (for marketing blogs)
• Join HARO (Help a Reporter Out)
• Review blog aggregators such as the Huffington Post and publications that use blogs for content such as Forbes and Business Insider
• Review LinkedIn blog listings on personal profiles (influential bloggers often list their blogs on their personal profiles)
• Review Twitter biographies (influential bloggers often link to their blogs in their Twitter biographies)
• Review Facebook profiles, Pages and Groups (again, blogs are often listed here)
• Blog commenters (blog commenters often link to their blogs when they comment on posts)

2) Offer helpful comments that progress the conversation

It may seem obvious, but you must actually read the conversation before commenting to ensure you don’t say something that has already been said. The goal of comments is to further the conversation beyond the post itself. Please don’t rephrase ideas already explained in the post itself or in other comments; you’re not doing yourself or anyone else any favours by doing this. Offering a fresh perspective on the topic being discussed can help establish you as a thought leader and can even situate you as the centre and driver of the conversation. If you can’t offer anything new, see if you can reply to comments already made on the post to demonstrate your engagement in the conversation.

Spelling and grammar count, folks, even in conversational forums that may seem relaxed. Never use slang variations of words and please use proper sentence style. I suggest you read this post on words you should never include in your blog posts and ensure you never make these mistakes in your comments either.

3) Weave channels together through comments

Lots of blogs let you sign in for comments using other social channels. Signing in as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, for example, can help other commenters find you on your other channels. Not only does this help you build out your communities beyond the post itself, it also adds credibility to your comments, especially if you are a leader or expert on the topic on which you are commenting and that credential is listed in your profile biography.

Furthermore, once you have commented, why not tweet about it from the comments section to inform your community of the great conversation happening and encourage them to participate, too? This lets others know you are social and an active contributor to your space and it can be appreciated by the author and fellow commenters of the post, further developing those relationships.

4) Further the conversation and maintain relationships on other channels

Building on the previous point, you should make an effort to seek out influential bloggers and commenters on other channels, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and develop relationships with them beyond the blog post. Furthermore, you could even further the post conversation on your social channels. For instance, you could post a tweet asking for your community’s opinion on the post topic and cc its author to try and drive a discussion on Twitter around the topic. You could also poll your community on the topic via Facebook and bring that result back to the blog post discussion, for example.

5) Consider blogging yourself

Blogging is the best way to establish yourself as a thought leader in your space, as it allows you to expand on topics beyond the character limits set by most social media sites. Furthermore, commenting on other blogs can help you develop content for your own blog. The benefits of blogging are numerous, and more than I care to discuss in this post, as the topic really does merit a post of its own. Here’s a great post published recently by Business 2 Community on the subject, Is blogging right for my business? The benefits of a business blog. These benefits are true for personal blogs as well.

What benefits have you seen come from tapping blogs for social media community development?

Image: InspirU