3 Ideas to Make Business Blogs More Interactive

Social marketing is one of the hottest trends in online business today.  A common social marketing strategy is to drive people to your business blog.  A companies business blog is their own social network, and should be a platform to engage visitors in meaningful interaction that allows for relationship building and commerce.  This post talks about 3 ideas to make your business blog more useful to you and visitors, and keep them coming back.

3 Ideas to Make Business Blogs More Interactive

Social marketing is arguably one of the biggest opportunities in some time for small business marketers to extend their reach.  It’s not limited to social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, business blogging is a great way to bring people into your companies social world, here are a few ideas to consider to make your business blogging more engaging:

1.) Twitter Feed

If you have a Twitter account (and you should), you can provide the search engines (and visitors) with fresh content by putting your most recent tweets on your blog.  You can do this easily by simply getting the code for your blog at the Twitter widget page .  They currently support the most popular blogging platforms.  If you host your own wordpress business blog, you might consider the WordPress plug-in, Twitter Tools by Alex King, available here .

2.) Enhance Your Business Blog Commenting System

Commenting is the hub of a blog, consider what these services provide to take default commenting to the next level:

• Seesmic : Allows commentors to drop video comments, indeed video is very powerful.  You can get the Seesmic plug-in for wordpress here.
• Disqus: Great interaction and commenting system, allows commentors comments to be tracked across the web (not just your site), so commentors benefit from commenting, because their comments are spidered by search engines, and are centrally available for those made through their Disqus account.
• Intense Debate: Taking interaction further, Intense Debate allows you and others to rate commentors comments with a simple thumbs up, or thumbs down.  It does a lot more than that (FriendFeed comment retrieval, sending a Twitter tweet when commenting, OpenID support, etc.), and is worth looking into.

3.) Your Slide Presentations (or others)

Slideshare allows you to upload slide presentations (like those created in Microsoft PowerPoint), and share them with the masses.  If this is useful to your audience, consider using the slideshare service on your blog.

Like other content sharing sites, not only can you embed a specific presentation into your blog (perhaps to reinforce the content of your post), but you can choose from a wide array of widgets on the Slideshare Widgets & Badges page.  While not highly interactive for a blog, I decided to include it because presentations hosted on slideshare generally do very well with the search engines, and slide shows containing a specific calls to action; go to this (blog) page, register here, etc. can do very well in driving interaction on a blog.

It’s important to make the most of your business blogging by capturing visitor interest and building interaction.  Whether it is your Twitter feed, interactive commenting system, or slide presentation.  Doing so will increase interaction, and help build community, and your brand.

Your Turn: This is far from a comprehensive list.  What have you seen and found useful to build interaction on a blog.  What are you using?  Chime in using the comment boxes below.

*Image credits to Foxtongue