How to Drive Long Term Engagement with Readers

Blogging and social media marketing are absolutely essential for any company – especially a small business. Small businesses start blogs or publishing content and are often able to attract a lot of initial buzz. But this initial enthusiasm wanes quickly because they are unable to convert first time visitors to their websites and blogs into loyal readers and struggle to drive engagement. This can be frustrating for small businesses and their content marketers as they have no clue how they can re-create the original response or get back those readers again. Below are some tips that can help you convert casual visitors into loyal readers and drive engagement with readers over a long length of time.

Drive Engagement With Readers

Publish Content Regularly

Often times, small businesses publish very interesting articles on their websites and other content marketing channels, which get a lot of reader engagement. But they are unable to follow up these articles with more interesting content. When readers go back to them to find new content and are unable to find any, most of them do not return the next time. You need to make sure that your company is publishing content on a regular basis so that readers always have something to read when they come back. Also, if you are regular, readers can anticipate when the next article or post is going to be published and return to your website on time. This ensures that you have a ready audience for future posts that you are publishing. However, creating new content on a regular basis can be difficult for small businesses as they may not find new things to write about. In such cases, small business can re-purpose their existing content in new and exciting ways. For example, you can convert your old articles into an ebook or a video series. You can also hire a content writing firm to manage content creation and publishing for you. They can come up with fresh content on a regular basis.

Engage Readers on Many Platforms

Small businesses are advised not to use only their blogs to attract and retain readers. Social media platforms are excellent for retaining and engaging with readers and customers. Use your blog to get readers to connect with you on various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. You can remind your social media followers every time you publish a new blog post, allowing you to get your readers back to your blogs and websites. Almost every social media platform offers social media plug-ins for a variety of blogging platforms and websites. By installing these plug-ins on your website, your readers can connect with your brand directly from your blog or website.

Always Respond to Comments

Many small businesses make the grave mistake of not replying to their readers’ comments on their blogs. This can make readers feel like their opinions are not being valued and the company is unwilling to listen to them. Make sure to reply to comments on your blog posts as quickly as you can. You can get readers to come back to your blog if you enable notifications for comments so that they get an email when you reply. It also helps if you have a new blog post up when you reply to comments so that when the readers come back to check the comments, they will notice the new blog post and read it. Sometimes comments can be spammy, silly or just plain negative. You can ignore or disable the spammy or silly ones but you must reply to the negative comments. Be as objective and diplomatic as possible and genuinely address the problems stated in the negative comments.

Develop a Writing Personality

This is where being consistent pays off. Polish your writing and grammar skills or make sure that experienced writers are writing for your brand. People love reading articles, even if they are on boring topics, if they are aware of the writer and have enjoyed his/her writing style before. The casual writing style and tone works best for blogs and social media platforms. Think of the kind of blogs you enjoy and the brands and authors whose blogs you like following. This can help you figure out the tone and style that will work for your company blog.