We often talk about the need to develop a content marketing mindset. This requires companies to think like publishers.

And that sounds an awful lot like social media in a definition that I saved and have embraced from Wikipedia several years ago:

Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers.

YOUR BLOG IS YOUR SECRET SOCIAL MEDIA WEAPON

Thanks to free or inexpensive blogging tools, any individual can be on the same technological footing as the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.  That may seem relatively obvious to many of you.  What I think is less obvious is that your blog is every bit as much a social media tool as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+.  In fact, I believe that a blog is the most important social media weapon in your arsenal.

HERE ARE THE 6 REASONS THAT YOUR BLOG MUST BE THE CORE OF YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY:

1. To have meaningful social media impact, you must provide a critical mass of content that will position you and your organization as thought leaders within your market niche. Nothing works better than a blog to achieve that objective.  Over time, your blog will contain an increasingly rich and relevant reservoir of information that serves as a Google magnet.  Thus, you will become more and more findable by those customers you need to attract. You are hidden away on Facebook and scattered all over the place on Twitter.
2. You can provide an unlimited amount of vital information in a single location. Because Web visitors are desperately seeking answers to their most pressing questions, you have the opportunity to provide just the right answers for your ideal target customers. The best blogs can provide the vast majority of targeted information that there ideal visitors require in their search for solutions.
3. Content aside, the structure of a blog enables you to organize your information almost effortlessly to the benefit of your visitors. By defining the most important areas of information that you will cover and translating them into ‘categories,’ you enable your visitors to find exactly what they want with minimal effort. You can’t do that on Facebook and only with difficulty on Twitter.
4. Unlike other social media tools, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, your blog is open to the entire world.  This enables you to achieve potentially infinite reach for your critical mass of content.  Although you may request visitors to register and offer them enticements such as a free e-book or eNewsletter, they don’t have to join a special club to benefit from your information.
5. You can be both timely and comprehensive.  Although Twitter couldn’t be more timely, the information, opinions, and advice you tweet can never be comprehensive.  Your blog can be just as timely as Twitter because you can post information instantaneously.  But you can also make each post as comprehensive as necessary and integrate that post with lots of other relevant information on your blog. Of course, you can send folks to your blog via a timely tweet.
6. Your blog posts, far from being isolated from other social media tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter, can be automatically pulled into each one.  Thus, those 4 powerhouses can enhance your online presence every time you post an article on your blog.  That’s 4 for the price of one.  Not bad.

The bottom line: Start your blog today.  It’s that important.