Most companies have blogs and many companies have multiple blogs with each one dedicated to a specific brand. But how many of these blogs are truly helping the brands they support?
Blogging is an excellent tool for content marketing and is a fantastic catalyst for engagement and social media marketing. Unfortunately, many company blogs aren’t helping the brands associated with them, and in some cases, those blogs are actually hurting the brands they support.
Which category does your company blog (or blogs) fall into? Aside from tracking performance metrics and pairing that data with the subjective opinions of the marketing team and executive team, it’s critical that you look at the blog from your target audience’s perspective. Is your content useful, meaningful, entertaining, interesting, and shareable? If not, then you’re not publishing the right kind of content.
What are you really talking about on your blog? Sure, there are probably main points you’re always trying to make directly and indirectly in your blog posts, but are those messages getting through to your audience?
One way to find out what you’re really talking about on your blog without subjective opinions or ulterior motives getting in the way is to create a word cloud using your blog’s RSS feed. Is this a scientific method of evaluating your blog’s content? No, but it will show you the words that are used most frequently on your blog and give you the opportunity to decide if those are the right words and messages that you want to be communicating through your blog posts. You might find out that you’re blog content matches your brand building goals perfectly, and you might learn that you need to overhaul your blog content because it’s not aligned with your brand goals and values at all.
To give you an idea of what a company blog word cloud looks like, take a look at the examples below, which were created using the free word cloud tool from Wordle. Do you think the words used most frequently on these companies’ blogs accurately reflect the brands associated with them?
Zappos Blog Word Cloud
The Zappos blog RSS feed was used to create the following word cloud.
Red Bull Blog Word Cloud
The Red Bull blog RSS feed was used to create the following word cloud.
General Motors FastLane Blog Word Cloud
The GM FastLane blog was used to create the following word cloud.
Google Blog Word Cloud
The Official Google Blog was used to create the following word cloud.
Image: Svilen Milev
Lucy is Editor at Corporate Eye
