Direct contact/interaction with your target group
A human face to the organization
Good for link building and findability in search engines
Relatively inexpensive compared to traditional shapes
Possible large reach through distribution via other social media
A good company blog
An interesting list of possible advantages. But of course an organization only benefits from these advantages if the quality of the blog is in order. As mentioned, both books and blogs about blogging , as well as scientific articles clearly explain what that means, blog quality.
Customer focus is the most important aspect: the customer/target group should always be the starting point of a blog post. The customer must get 'something' from the blog post. This can be in the form of tips, solutions to problems or simply by offering new information. An advertising pitch is out of the question: readers avoid that and can have a negative effect on the image that people have of the organization.
A personal tone is also crucial – just like on other forms of social media. Precisely because a blog can give an organization a human face, a purely business text is useless. Preferably speaking in the first person and directly aimed at the reader – that is the starting point according to the experts. An organization increases the human appearance by not only mentioning the author with each blog post, but preferably also his contact details and photo – as here on Frankwatching. The chance of interaction is greater this way: people respond more quickly to a person than to an organization.
In addition to offering interesting content, a good company blog is also characterized by a high degree of user-friendliness. The reader must be able to easily find what he is looking for – for example via widgets – and it must be immediately clear what the blog is about. A blog must also offer sufficient interaction options. In the posts themselves, but also by mentioning email addresses and social media accounts.
Research design
What a good company blog should look like is therefore quite clearly austria phone number list formulated. My measuring instrument served as an objective checklist, with which I could determine the quality of a blog point by point. Some example questions from the instrument:
Indicate whether the blogger challenges the reader to respond
Indicate whether the blog post has a current cause
Please indicate whether the following navigation options are available on the blog
In total I assessed the content of the blog posts on the basis of 20 points and the form and user-friendliness on the basis of 30 components. I examined 40 Dutch company blogs, with a distinction between 4 groups of 10 blogs:
Group 1: large companies, among the 250 largest companies in the Netherlands
Group 2: ICT companies
Group 3: Online marketing agencies
Group 4: communication agencies
The choice to assess corporate blogs of large companies was mainly determined by previous studies. In most studies, blogs of companies from the Fortune 500 serve as research material. I chose the other 3 groups mainly because they should be familiar with the phenomenon of blogging from their profession. For example, you would expect ICT companies to be user-friendly in any case, while a communications agency can be expected to have strong content. Together, the 40 blogs form a good cross-section of the Dutch corporate blogging world today.