Once your Agency has established a blog, it is important to create fresh content so that its growth does not stagnate. Otherwise it eventually will suffer from dystrophy and become useless.

There are many different ideas and theories regarding ideal posting frequency and the posting day/time. This is something you can decide best practice by performing an analysis of a blog’s analytics. As a simple guideline for any Agency to use before such a study is conducted, our recommendation is a minimum 3-4 posts a week published between 7:00am and 9:00am local time for general posts. Breaking news and alerts should be posted as promptly as possible.

Here are 7 types of blog posts agencies can create to fulfill that type of obligation:

• News – Share the latest news from inside your organization as well as current trending issues in the community and how it can potentially affect your organization
• Educational – Every month and week of the year has awareness campaigns built around them, as the Safety Observances 2010 list and 2010 Health Observance Calendar shows. You can use these calendars to prepare content in advance and spread awareness through your community
• Celebratory – Celebrating jobs well done, agency successes, and highlighting positive effects is a great way to communicate value to your community
• Promotional – Promote a new or long standing service, safety program, or event by providing an in depth look using both words and images
• Preparational – Prepare both the residents and responders of your community for potential disasters that are specific for your region through blog posts on a seasonal cycle
• Alerts – Alert your responders and community to impending disasters, such as a potentially damaging storm front or budget cutting legislation that will negatively affect service delivery
• Linking – Share links to news items, situation updates, and important information that will affect your community

Whether you are using your blog as a hub for your online presence or not, keeping it well updated and a resource for your community is a must. Utilizing these simple blog post types should be able to keep you blogging all year long!

Which blog post type (from above or your own) do you think works best for your agency?

Download – Safety Observances 2010

About The Author

Dave Konig has authored 135 articles for PIOSocialMediaTraining.com

Dave has been involved in Social Media since 2005 through the current major services and some defunct ones as well. During this time he has been able to hone the craft by testing out the theories of others, creating his own philosophies, and gathering a better understanding of the mediums involved through networking and most importantly actual practice.

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