Imagine Your Reality

I’ve discussed social media and audience in regards to social networking, but lets turn now to other mediums of social media, such as blogs. A blog, such as this one, can be its own website as well as directing readers to the primary website. But a blog is much more than a website, when we factor in the interactive elements such as comments that allow people to participate in a conversation, or the relatively recent addition of social bookmarking and social networking share buttons that allow readers to promote the content of a blog to other mediums.

Additionally, if you are like me, you might repost excerpts of your blog, with a link back on some of your social networking sites. For instance, on a few different Linkedin groups, I post excerpts of these blog entries, with a link back to the blog. It’s my hope that I’ll start some conversations on Linkedin, but also get some more readers.

However for that to work, I also need to think about who my audience is for this blog. Who do I ideally want to be reading this blog? What message am I conveying and is it a message that someone needs to read? Is the information useful?  Am I willing to respond when people make a comment on the blog?

All of these questions are important in determining the audience of a blog as well as how you will engage that audience. If I were to post my blog entries to random groups on Linkedin, it would be annoying to the people in those groups and also an uncoordinated and uninformed approach to getting an audience to read my blog.

Audience in this case is determined by a mixture of communicating with people in the industry and to current clients and potential prospects about the information, but this applies to any blogger who is focused on writing about a specific industry and the on-going trends in that industry. It’s important to consider not only what you will write, but where you will get your blog distributed to, in order to catch reader interest, and gain a following who will consistently read your blog. By determining where you can place excerpts of your blog to catch reader interest, you can then build a following and also ensure your blog is getting more visibility than if you simply posted.