What is Microblogging & How to Leverage it for Your Business?

Long-form content works great. We all have heard this a trillion times from internet marketing gurus and even top-ranking blog posts. 

But, what about the readers? Are they all gonna just sit down and read your 2000 or maybe 5000 words blog posts?

I doubt, most of them just skim through headings. 

And that’s not all, with ever-diminishing attention spans, it’s true that at least a good percentage of long-form blog posts are being flushed down the drain. 

Well, if securing a top position on Google search is not your agenda, there is something else that you can try. It works, has worked in the past and importantly, it’s less time-consuming. 

It’s called Micro-Blogging. The practice of frequently publishing short paragraphs of content along with images or videos mostly through social media channels such as Instagram or Facebook. 

In this quick ‘not-so-long’ blog post, we’ll discuss microblogging and how you can leverage it for your business. 

Microblogging is nailing it

 

Look at this Instagram account called Humans Who Grow Food. Exceptional, and if you are someone who loves a bit of greenery, it’s a visual treat. This account features humans beings from across the globe who are trying to grow their own food in their backyard. It’s mostly small-scale vegetable farming and sometimes poultry. 

This Instagram account sources images from people who are growing food across the globe. And then they add a short story to the image which often gets a lot of engagement. Humans Who Grow Food are active on Instagram as well as Facebook with a good number of followers and engagement. 

This is a perfect example of microblogging through which you can build a community online. 

Luckily, microblogging is not only for part-time or full-time bloggers. It is also a channel that brands can leverage to build credibility and bring in more revenue. 

Below is another example of microblogging by National Geographic.

 

Now let’s discuss why as a brand you should be leveraging microblogging. 

Reasons to consider microblogging for your business

For certain types of businesses, microblogging can turn really convenient. 

Below are some of the top reasons to pick up microblogging. 

Quick content creation

The biggest advantage of microblogging is the time spent on content creation. On average microblogs contain anywhere between 300 to 800 characters of text. This is in addition to the image or video that is associated with it. 

When normal blog posts today are 3000 or 5000 words long, it often takes a day or two for content creators to publish them. Whereas microblogs can be created quickly with just an image and a short paragraph. This makes it easy for content creators to create and publish multiple microblogs on a single day.

Quick content promotion

Microblogging makes it easy to promote content as well. As your content is primarily published on social media channels, you tend to reach a large number of audiences who are already following your account. Also, you can use relevant hashtags on platforms like Instagram to reach even more people.

More real-time content

If you are a business, microblogging will allow you to share more real-time content. This will help you create posts about events or other important engagements related to your business. As microblogging takes relatively less time to create and promote content, sharing your events in real-time with your audience will be a lot easier.

Make use of multiple channels

In conventional blogging, you will normally be publishing content on your blog associated with your business website. But in microblogging, you can create one piece of content and publish it on multiple channels without causing any issue of duplicate content. 

Here are some of the popular platforms that you can use for microblogging. 

• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Quora

How to leverage microblogging for your business

In order to find success from microblogging, you need to integrate it with your overall content strategy and put consistent efforts. 

The below steps will help you find success through microblogging for your business. 

Have a microblogging strategy in place

Just like you have an overall content strategy, you need to have a microblogging strategy as well. 

Ideally, your microblogging strategy should cover the following aspects.

The objective of your microblogging efforts

You need to first figure out what you are planning to achieve from microblogging. The objectives can vary depending on businesses and industries. For some businesses, it can be brand building and for some others, it can be achieving conversions or generating leads. 

Audience of your microblogs

It is important that you first map out your audience. So that you can plan the right kind of content that will suit your audience. An audience can be defined based on age, gender, interests, income level, profession etc. Again, this will vary across industries and businesses. 

Content types that you are planning leverage

Though microblogs majorly contain some amount of text, you need to decide other formats of content that you are going to leverage. You can always combine videos and images with text to make it appealing for your audience. 

Channels that you are going to make use of

You need to be thoughtful while choosing your channels for microblogging. Because depending on the audience that you are trying to target, you should be picking the right channels. For example, a jewelry brand may be able to get results from microblogging on Instagram. But it may not work out the same way for them on LinkedIn. 

 Your budget for microblogging

If you decide to become serious about microblogging, you need to see your budget as well. It’s better if you can assign your budgets for content creation, promotion, designing etc. 

Frequency/schedule of your posts

You need to plan the number of microblogs that you are going to publish every day. You can create a content calendar to keep track of your microblogs. This should ideally contain the daily frequency of posts, time for publishing, content formats and microblog topics. 

Measurement of success: engagement, conversions etc.

Most of the channels that we discussed, Instagram, LinkedIn or even Facebook allows you to look at your engagement metrics. As part of your microblogging strategy, you need to decide what are the metrics that you are going to track. Also, if you are planning on achieving conversions or generating leads from microblogging, you need to plan out that as well as part of your strategy.

Create quality content

Quality content can be defined in multiple ways. Ideally, it should be attractive and engaging to your target audience. Always make sure you are creating relevant content as part of your microblogging efforts. That means, your content should be useful to your audience in some way. 

An image or video that you add on your microblog is critically important. Often the image or video is the aspect that pulls your audience to your microblogs. Along with text, you need to ensure that your images and videos on microblogs are super attractive. 

Microblogging is about pushing more

Microblogging, unlike conventional blogging, takes less time to execute. You can plan, create and publish multiple microblogs in a single day. 

To publish a microblog post, it shouldn’t take much time. Ideally, you should be able to do it within 30 minutes to 1 hour. This will help you increase the number of posts that you can publish in a single day. 

Value addition vs. conversion

Just like other content marketing methods, microblogging should also involve value addition. This is important in gaining and maintaining an engaging set of followers on your microblogging channels. 

Microblog posts that are entirely promotional should be published carefully. The right strategy is to build an audience first with value-adding posts and then slowly push promotional posts that are intended at generating leads or purchases. 

Conclusion

Microblogging is a great way to build a solid brand presence online. It takes less time to create posts and publish them. Also, it is less expensive as it doesn’t require you to build a website or a self-hosted blog. 

Microblogging works great for multiple industries. However, you have to make sure you are picking the right channels to publish your microblogs. 

Finally, make sure the image or video that you are using on microblogs is attractive enough, and make your text part simple and easy to read. This will help you find success through microblogging. 

Don’t hesitate to leave a comment if you have any queries or feedback.