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Blogging and Social Media: Tools to Build Your Online Presence

Contributor

Whether you’re a business owner looking to reach customers or an individual who wants to build an online personality, blogging and social media are two of the most important tools you can use. Utilizing these two tools in conjunction with one another is a key component of building a strong online presence, and creating an image for yourself or your company.

Here are 6 quick tips for using your blog in conjunction with your social media profiles to build an online presence.

Focus on the VRIN Score

The first thing to consider is the VRIN score of everything you post. Coined by entrepreneur and online personality Tai Lopez, VRIN stands for:

  • Value – A post that people care about, that is relatable, and adds value to people’s lives.
  • Rarity – The topic is not something that people see all the time.
  • Inimitable – Your post is difficult for your competitors to duplicate; it’s unique.
  • Non-substitutable – There is no other place where people can find the information you’re giving.

So when you’re writing a blog, assess its content based on the factors above to determine its VRIN scores. If it can’t offer all of these things, consider a different topic.

Share Your Blogs on Your Profile Pages

Don’t just write a blog and leave it sitting on your website, hoping people will find it. You have built a social media following for a reason. Use it! Share every blog you write to your social media pages. At the very least, this should include Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Your followers on those platforms are the ones who are most likely to read your blogs anyways, so you might as well tell them you’re posting something!

Tell Your Brand Story

Your blog and social media pages are both great tools for telling an overarching story about your brand. Consumers want to connect on a personal level with the businesses they buy from, so tell them your story. Write a blog about how you first came up with the idea for your business, and tell the story of how it all came to fruition. Talk about your vision for the future.

Make it as personal as possible, and mirror that personal connection through your social media outlets. You may even want to create a YouTube video to tell the same brand story. Airbnb has had huge success with this approach through their Airbnb Stories YouTube channel.

Connect Social Media Accounts to Your Page

For businesses and bloggers alike, connecting your page to your social media accounts is essential to engaging your audience on as many levels as possible. Virtually every website building platform offers the ability to place social media buttons at the top of your page. If you’re not using this tool, you’re losing followers.

Use as Many Platforms as Possible

Don’t just limit yourself to Facebook and Twitter. Get on Snapchat and Instagram. Make your own YouTube channel. Join every social media platform that you can, and engage as often as you can. Use your Snapchat or Instagram to tell a visual story that connects to your latest blog post. Images generate interest, which can lead to more traffic to your website.

Join Appropriate Social Media Groups

There are a lot of groups on Facebook dedicated to a huge variety of topics. If you’re a blogger, look for blogger support groups. If you’re an entrepreneur, join a few groups for that. Connect with people who are doing and talking about the same things you do and talk about. Connecting with like-minded people will build you a surprisingly large following very quickly.

But be careful with mixing business and personal posts where you may be vulnerable to criticism, derision, or even blackmail. You should understand the legality of various social media and internet smearing techniques, for instance you should even learn if blackmail is illegal, before you make yourself vulnerable.

Building an online presence does take time, but if you leverage social media alongside your blog, you can cultivate a presence more quickly than you might imagine.