Social Media B2B

One of the sessions at the Marketing Profs B2B Forum was the Better Blogging for Business hot seat lab where Galen De Young, Managing Director at Proteus B2B, took us through three examples of company blogs. Each company volunteered to be included in the review by both Galen and the session attendees. Below is a recap of our comments about each blog and how it might be improved to generate more interaction among customers and potential customers.

Package Machinery Company

What we liked:

• It is very clear where to go and what the blog is going to be about.
• The blog is also fully integrated into the site, so that the company’s website gets all the SEO benefits of having a blog.
• Because it is fully integrated into the site it also has the same look and feel as the rest of the site, which is great from a branding standpoint.
• We loved the recent post links to the left. This means that visitors don’t have to scroll too far to see other topics.

What needs work:

• Some of the key engagement tools needed to be clearer. By moving the RSS feed to a more visible place they could build their audience more quickly.
• If you use icons for RSS, people are almost twice as likely to engage because it is visually more appealing.
• This blog is lacking an author. People buy from people, so by putting a face of a writer there is more opportunity to connect and feel comfortable.
• Not every post includes a picture. Pictures make posts more visually stimulating as well as allow you to add Alt Text, which is another keyword that Google will index.
• The blog does have social sharing options, which is great, but there are too many choices for sharing. Think about who your target audience is and what tools they use to share. Email is still the number one most important sharing option for most audiences, so be sure to include a way for your audience to send posts in an email.
• This blog also looks great in Firefox, but several things got messed up when we looked at it in Internet Explorer. Make sure to check all browsers when you design your blog.

Integration Point, Inc.

What we liked:

• This blog had a digestible number of social sharing options that included email.
• The blog was very easy to read. Scanning was easy because of bullet points and bolded key words.
• The title tags used best practices. You always want to have the title of the blog first and then the company name because this is how it will show up in the search results and your content is what you want people to see.

What needs work:

• The URL of this blog isn’t keyword rich. ?p=388 isn’t going to mean anything to search engines.
• The blog doesn’t match the look and feel of the company site, which causes a disconnect in branding.
• There is a spelling error on the front page of the blog.
• The left hand column has so many choices that it is over double the length of the post. Consolidating some of the categories can make it easier for people to know where they would like to go.

MLT Creative

What we liked:

• The blog has several contributors, which makes it easier to produce more content. But even more we liked that at the bottom of each post was a picture of the author and links to their personal Twitter and LinkedIn profiles.
• This blog links to a lot of things inside of every post. By linking to other blogs it encourages other people to link back to you and share your content with their audiences.
• At the bottom of each one of these posts are links to related posts. This drives deeper engagement. This blog was using LinkWithin, which is a Wordpress plug-in that pulls in related post automatically.

What needs work:

• The blog posts are a decent size. It would be better if there was an intro to each blog post on the blog’s homepage with a link to read more. You want Google to index each individual page so it benefits you to send traffic to additional pages on your blog.
• This blog used the title of the post as the URL. This created a very long URL. It would be better to use key words for a shorter URL. This is also an opportunity to use variations of the keywords.

On all three of these sites we kept coming back to 5 things you need to do before you start blogging:

• define your business objectives
• define your audience
• define your keyword targets
• define your content strategy
• define your metrics to evaluate success and progress

This is a very quick look at these three blogs. Does you have additional tips or thoughts on how these blogs can be improved?

Jenna Jantsch is the Social Media Marketing Manager at VerticalResponse. Follow Vertical Response on Twitter @VR4SmallBiz.

Related posts:

1. A Guide To Making Corporate Blogging Happen In Your Business In the past few months I have talked with...
2. Business Blogging Resources SocialMediaB2B Posts: 10 Business Blogging Best Practices 20 Ideas...
3. Blogging for the Future: The Long Tail of Search Everyone talks about the real time web and the...
4. Business Blogging Isn’t Dead: 4 Reasons Blogs Are Critical To B2B Social Media Success The coolest thing to do on the Internet, in...
5. 6 Keys to B2B Blogging Success An important part of most B2B social media strategies...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.