Using Social Media: Blogs
Use blog posts to add insights and a personal perspective into Communities Talk activities and news. Blog posts can be written and posted as frequently as you wish, but they should maintain a somewhat regular schedule so that they continue to be useful. After you write a post, remember to tag it with keywords or topics—including #CommunitiesTalk—so that readers can find posts that are relevant and important to them.
Blogging to Promote Your Communities Talk Activity
You can use blog posts to promote your Communities Talk activity in two ways. First, if your organization has its own blog, create content by asking staff or organization members to post the reasons why preventing alcohol and other drug misuse is important to them. Weave in content like prevention news, research, and trending topics. Second, create posts to promote your activity that include who, what, when, where, and why. Highlight the speakers as well as details that will help people participate, including the technology you'll be using for virtual events and links to any registrations that you have.
Don't have a blog? Create one through free services like WordPress or Tumblr. Or publish your blog content as articles on your LinkedIn page.
Also, look for opportunities to contribute as a guest to prominent local community blogs that are related to healthy youth development. Examples of these could be from PTA groups, Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, or athletic boosters. The Blog Search Engine and Google Blog Search are free tools to find blogs. Once you have identified a good blog opportunity, ask if you can write a guest post about the consequences of alcohol and other drug misuse. Highlight your activity or event as a way the community can engage in prevention and help protect and promote its health and future.
Blogging Tips
- Know your audience, and make sure your message matches their interests. For example, if your audience is mainly PTA members or college students and administrators, link alcohol and other drug misuse to school safety issues or low academic performance.
- Write a captivating introduction to grab the audience's attention and keep it. Then, specifically state what readers will gain from the blog post to encourage them to continue reading.
- If you have a lot of content, break it into multiple paragraphs—perhaps even with subheads—and integrate lists and other formatting to keep readers interested.
- Provide a clear call to action at the end of your blog post. For example, you could send your readers to an additional resource related to the blog post or ask them to comment on your blog post or share something with their online community.
- Add a set of keywords related to your blog post. This will increase the probability that your blog post will show up in search engines. You can search for keywords using Google Trends.
- Always include a relevant visual in your blog post, as users are more drawn to visual content. To illustrate your points in the post, use your own photos or videos, low-cost stock photos, or photos from Flickr's Creative Commons.
- Use the #CommunitiesTalk hashtag throughout your blog post and in your posts on social media. This will encourage your readers to search for and use the hashtag in their own content.
Blogging Tools
- Coschedule—Gives a quick, free assessment of a headline's structure, grammar, and readability.
- Hemingway—Highlights long or hard to read sentences.
- Grammarly—Catches common grammatical mistakes often overlooked by Microsoft Word.
- Canva—Creates images and graphics for your blog posts to give them dimension and visual interest.
- Blog Title Generator—Stumped for content or need ideas on a particular topic? Enter keywords for blog post suggestions.
- Lumen5—Creates impactful, engaging videos from your existing content.
- Airtable—Organizes workflow and editorial calendars for blog content.