Ways To Embrace Your Audience

Blogging is about interaction.  While it’s great to deliver fantastic content, or have a brilliant style of writing, it’s seemingly useless if you don’t have strong followers to communicate with.  The purpose of blogging is to convey information to your readers and encourage conversation.  It is imperative, then, as a blogger, to make those who interact with you a part of your community.

Getting readers to engage with your blog seems easy, right?  Well, it can be.  There are several tips suggested toward effectively embracing your audience.  I thought it would be fun to explore a few. 

1. Encourage Comments and Forums

While it may seem “Blogging 101”, comments and forums are the simplest means of obtaining audience participation.  You have to get your audience talking, and encouraging comments is the easiest way to do so.  For example, your entire post can be based on a question (i.e. “Why Do We Blog?”).  Questions lead readers to interpret their own opinions on what you have just written and will encourage them to form their own opinions.   Comments and forum space are a rudimentary principle that should be engraved in the minds of all bloggers.  

2.  An “Ask The Author” Box

Utilizing an ask box unites your audience with yourself as the writer.  If audience members need clarification on misleading information or want a comment answered, an ask box is the best go about doing this.  Readers can get their questions directly answered from you, which translates to more audience interaction as a communal effort. 

3.  Utilize Social Media

    Ah yes, but where would audience interaction be without good ole’ social media?  While it’s easy to get confused by all the various social media platforms available, as long as you focus on the “social” part of it all, you’ll do just fine.  If you receive emails, tweets, or comments from readers, ensure a response is granted.  Include a personal touch by utilizing RTs and replies , keyword being personal.  You want your readers to WANT to come back to your site.  As social media relationships grow stronger, your audience gets wider!

While you’re working on actively engaging your audience it’s also important not to lose sight of yourself and your vision as a blogger.  Don’t get too wrapped up in whoever you think your audience wants you to be.  Make sure you maintain true to your values.  That’s why they came to you in the first place. 

This guest blog post was written by PRowl Staff Member Emily O'Connell.

6 Steps to a Successful #TwitterChat

Thanks to social media, we can now connect with our audiences without venues, catering services, or formal invites.

A Twitter chat is similar to any online chat where users log on at the same time to discuss a common topic. These chats are a great way to bring together a large audience without the hassles of a face-to-face meet up. Here are six ways to insure the success of your Twitter chat.

1. Choose a topic: Before you can start or invite anyone to your Twitter chat, you have to decide what you will talk about. Take into consideration what you want to learn from the chat. Is it just a chance to interact with your audience, or are you looking for more? These questions will help you formulate the perfect topic.

2. Promotion: If no one knows about your chat, no one can participate! Tweeting about the chat a week or so prior will draw in attention and notify your followers. Make sure you include the time the chat will start and that you are conscious of different time zones.

3. Create the perfect hashtag: A hashtag is simply a phrase preceded by the pound sign (#) that brands a tweet or, in this case, your chat. The hashtag is what will connect everyone participating in the chat, and allow you to track what is being said. When creating the hashtag, remember to keep it short, as a tweet can only be 140 characters long, spaces included! The hashtag should only take up a small portion of a tweet. The hashtag should also be relevant to the topic of your chat. For example, if your chat topic is about the book The Hunger Games, #HungerGames would be an ideal hashtag.

4. Create time limits: As much as you might love to interact with your audience non-stop, it is important that you place time limits on your chat. Because many people will be tweeting from their personal accounts, they will not want to clog their timelines with Tweets from your chat alone.

5. Be consistent: Decide on the style of your Twitter chat and then stick to it! You can either throw your topic out there and let your audience chime in, or you can ask questions throughout, which tends to be a more interactive style.

6. Track your chat: It’s important that you keep up with what’s being said in your chat. TweetChat is a great online application that enables you to easily track the hashtag you’ve generated.

This guest blog was written by PRowl Public Relations staff member Amber Burns.

Philly.com: To Allow Comment or Not to Allow Comments

A news website is generally no stranger to controversy. However for Philly.com, much of the controversy takes place in its infamous comment sections. Philly.com’s comments are getting out of hand, and soon the website must decide once and for all if it will continue to allow them.

Philly.com’s comment sections have long plagued an otherwise quality news website. Commenters often overwhelm stories with nonsensically vicious, racist, sexist and downright nasty comments. The most recent example of this is the website’s story on Fox 29 firing its weatherman John Bolaris. Even seemingly tame stories get special treatment from the Philly.com comments, including Stu Byko’s recap of the New Year’s Day Mummers Parade.

Philly.com has become wary of its anonymous commenters. The news website now disables comments on its more controversial stories. On other stories, Philly.com forces users to log into their Facebook accounts to comment. This attaches a profile picture and name to all comments, theoretically deterring hateful speech.

Unfortunately for Philly.com, the Facebook log in system hasn’t quite worked to its advantage. The comments continue to be just as brutal as ever, forcing the news website to disable comments within hours of posting many new stories.

Comment sections can be a great way to increase user engagement, but what do you do when users get out of hand? Philly.com needs to decide if this added engagement is worth the humiliating content.

If the website decides to allow comments, I would suggest it creates a set of guidelines setting acceptable comment content dimensions, much like NewsWorks’ Community Discussion Guidelines.

Re-thinking Engagement

A recent article in Ragan.com, "Are we killing them with engagement?” got me thinking about the approach PR professionals take when engaging with those using social media. Which leads me to share this new fact: Facebook users are beginning to "un-like" business pages.

I have been told by multiple professors and PR professionals that engaging and initiating conversation with your organizations publics is essential in developing and maintaining relationships. Well, there might be a problem with that, most people are not willing to talk or engage with the organization or its representatives.

People or public's want to engage in things that interest them, friends and hobbies. Being asked to give your opinion about a product or brand or even answering a question posed by the organization just clogs up their news feed. In turn, we are seeing resentment toward the organization or brand.

So, we need a new plan, a more "customer-centric" approach. A better approach would be specifically identifying needs and addressing them accordingly, going from general to specific, and individually targeting certain people based on their particular needs. This can and should go so far as writing on their Facebook page, personal blog, or mentioning them on Twitter.