Stefanie Marrone is a former journalist turned blogger who also happens to be the author of The Social Media Butterfly. Her blog shares the same name, providing marketing advice and sharing business development tips all from the social media expert herself. Stefanie sat down with LexBlog’s Bob Ambrogi on This Week in Legal Blogging to discuss her blog’s foundation and offer some LinkedIn guidance.
Here’s the full episode and, down below, we have a selection of the best exchanges.
Do you think the name of the blog matters much to you?
I think it does matter. I mean, I think that you want to resonate with people. You want to find a balance between the two, like something that is appealing to a lot of people but also is unique. So I think there’s a happy medium between the two. I think a name has to be something well thought out and planned and you go through a number of names. I’ve done this so many times. And I’ve been vetoed too.
What were your goals personally, why did you start a blog? What did you hope to do with it or achieve with it?
I was putting out a lot of stuff, also on LinkedIn publisher, and then posts and they were sort of all over the place. So Kevin would see my posts, and he would say, “This is such good stuff, but they’re all they’re all over the place. You need one place where people can find everything.” And then you can re-purpose from there. And he said, “I think you’re going to have a following if you have it in one place.” And then also, obviously from a search engine optimization perspective, I wanted people to be able to find me easily as well. The blog actually turned into what is now my website. And actually, Bob, I don’t know if you know this, but I’ve gotten clients from the blog. You know, from just writing and people seeing it, people hearing about it, reading an article, which has been terrific, somebody saying you’re googling me and checking it out and saying, okay, she knows her stuff. I don’t know that I would be any better of a spokesperson for why you should have a blog of the fact that, you know, obviously I need to sell myself at some point and like, sound reputable, but the blog has been a great way for me to get my foot in the door to show that I know what I’m talking about.
Did that surprise you? Or were you expecting that? What happened?
No, it didn’t surprise me. It confirmed, again, that thought leadership and having opinions and writing about substantive things does really make a difference and the importance of content in terms of leading to new business like I had been telling lawyers this for years, but I can now say that this actually works in a different industry, you know, tangentially related, but lawyers hire me based on what I’m writing. So I can’t see why a buyer of legal services wouldn’t hire a lawyer based on what they’re writing about.
You know that that actually raises it a couple of points there, one is on on the when to post. It’s interesting you say there is no right or wrong time.
There’s the better time to post which is what is still traditional commuting hours in your timezone. So from 7 to 10 in the morning, and then lunchtime, and then 4 to 8pm because people who used to commute now aren’t commuting, but they still have downtime, eating breakfast, lunch, dinner. So they’re still a captive audience. People are sitting on their couches at night, and they want, you know, to connect, etc. The weekend is actually really good. Because again, first of all, people don’t know what day of the week it is. So I’m finding my posts on the weekends actually do really well. Saturday is better than Sunday.
What’s your advice to a professional about how to create the connection between their blog and LinkedIn and how to balance again, what they’re doing on LinkedIn, what they’re doing on their blog?
I struggled with this for a little while myself. Everybody who is on LinkedIn, which should be everybody, should be promoting their blog posts on LinkedIn. So you know, a lot of us don’t have as many blog followers as we do LinkedIn connections. So what do you do? You take your blog post, you write a short little synopsis, and you post it on LinkedIn. That’s what you do and you find the right hashtags. The most important thing you can do—this has been happening on Twitter for years—but hashtags are so important on LinkedIn to help your content get discovered. You know, LinkedIn sometimes will suggest hashtags, they aren’t always the right ones. You have to use, your old Yahoo search bar, and search for hashtags. Hashtags with too many followers are bad and too few followers are bad too.
• • • •
Head to YouTube to check out more episodes of This Week in Legal Blogging—or, join us as they happen on Facebook Live, each and every week at noon PDT.