One of our readers has sent us a question. We think you might be interested in hearing about our answer to this reader. The question below addresses the strategic issue about how to identify and serve one’s niche more effectively, while making one’s blog more attractive to the target audience(s).
The question posted to us is short but quite challenging and reads as follows:
Dear ComMetrics
I was hoping you could give me some info what is best for good blogging (how often to blog and stuff).
Below we list four points that we think our reader should consider when trying to devise a social media strategy that helps a blog’s success.
1 Who is Your Target Audience?
It is difficult to know in social media land who your audience is. Another challenge is to know what will resonate with them and how to tap into their interests and needs.
B2B audiences are quite fragmented. They might range from your employees, channel partners, third party vendors, customers and potential clients. Based on our experience it is most effective if you focus on three of these possible target audiences. Thereafter, just focus on their needs and go with it.
For a business, primary audience may be customers, followed by potential customers and then maybe suppliers/channel partners.
However, if your audience are students things could be very different. For instance, a student newspaper at a university may have three target audiences, namely, students, staff and alumni. Maybe the order I wrote these things in might have to be changed. Nonetheless, focusing on more than three target groups makes serving their needs too difficult to manage. So identify your niche and run with it.
Oh and just in case you forgot, remind yourself over and over when writing, what are my three primary target audiences? Most critical is to be able to respond to the question:
– is the post I am writing relevant to the audience I must reach?
Keep this question in mind when writing.
2 When should I post?
Look at the statistics for your blog to find out when you have most of your visitors. If you run a blog for your customers (e.g., real estate buyers, investment services, computer hardware), it could very well be that most traffic you get happens between Tuesday – Friday.
Mondays seem to be bad days because people are coming back from their weekend and are trying to catch up with work. This means that they might have less time to check all the e-mail or RSS feeds they got from you over the weekend. As well, by 13:00 hours on Friday some people have left for the weekend.
As well, we had to consider the fact that many of our readers do subscribe to our feeds using an e-mail address from their employer. Hence, most traffic for our blogs is Tuesday – Friday. Traffic drops off right after noon Friday. As well, are target audience is primarily in Europe. It appears looking at our server logs that they do not check their work e-mail account frequently during weekends. Hence, posting on a weekend does not increase our traffic much from the European executives we target.
With students, you might get much traffic on weekends because this is so-called study time. Accordingly, besides doing assignments students may give themselves some time for short breaks. During these, it could very well happen that they read blog posts. You have to check and test to see what works best for your subscribers.
3 Should I Keep a Posting Schedule?
Some people say you should keep a regular schedule. Others claim that this is a bad idea. For instance, Yahoo and other search engines might check on those dates when you are scheduled to post. In turn, if you decide one week to post on a Saturday, Google might not index the post for several hours.
However, the answer could also be much easier than worry about this. Once again, it all depends on your subscribers. If they get your posts through an e-mail feed they might read the material, whenever they have time do read the stuff. To illustrate, server statistics indicate that subscribers (i.e. e-mail and RSS feed) appear to read our content around lunchtime Monday through Friday.
Please let us know if you have had the same experience with your readers. Please leave a comment below.
4 How Often Should I Post a Story?
Some people argue that daily posts will get you more traffic. Besides the reasons why this might not suit your subscribers (see points 1-3), traffic should not matter that much to you. What matters most is whether you are reaching your target audience. Therefore, how many people read your posts might seem irrelevant. Engaging the audience you want to have a relationship with seems a much smarter strategy than posting frequently.
The other issue is also if you write all by yourself or together with others. Quality content takes time to write. Most importantly, let us not forget that quality content takes time for your subscribers to read.
How much time is your target audience willing to spend for reading your posts each week?
Having a successful career, a family with children and an active social life (e.g., doing sports, hanging out with your friends) means having less time to read your blog.
Depending on your audience, it is probably wiser to have fewer high quality posts each week (e.g., 2) instead of a stream of low quality chatter (remember the Wendy’s commercial – the key to success is – where is the beef)
Bottom Line
According to Technorati, only 11% of all blogs appear to update weekly.
With a maturing blogosphere, measuring success is shifting from traffic to reader loyalty. Hence, making every word count with your target audience is the best strategy.
As for me, I will continue to post only when I have something to say.