At ePages we develop ecommerce solutions. Thus, we had enough techies around that supported us setting up a company tech blog. Our API documentation was already Jekyll-based. As Jekyll is a blog engine, it came natural to use it also as a platform for our tech blog. The epagesdevs social media adventure, including the blog as well as a Twitter account, started two years ago.
In the following, I will give you some detailed insights on what we have learned ever since we began our social media journey and how we engaged in the developer community with our tech blog and Twitter.
Making the first steps
Once the technical framework was set, we were ready to go. But where do you actually start when beginning to blog from zero?!
First of all, we had to consider that a tech blog requires the right content for our target group. Our main goal is to let other developers and interested parties know about our technology stack as well as the challenges we face during software development and how we solve them. Furthermore, we are establishing new APIs, actively live Scrum and agile processes as well as participate in lots of conferences throughout the year. Not to forget that we’re proud of our company culture and familiar working atmosphere. Having this in mind, made us come up with the following main categories for our blog:
- API Experience
- Coding
- Events
- Language & Localization
- Methods & Tools
- On the job
- Tech Stories
- TechComm & Social Media
Planning our content ahead not only saves us lots of unnecessary stress when it comes to fresh content ideas, but also lets us see the big picture. Therefore, we developed an editorial calendar to determine who would cover which topic area for a respective publication date. Usually, we have a rough content plan for the next two months and try to publish at least four times per month. We soon created a rotating system to make sure that our different development teams take turns in writing blog posts. Here is an example snapshot of our editorial calendar:
Define guidelines for tech blog contributors
Once you’ve determined the new blog’s content structure, it is time to start with the creative writing process. For a company tech blog there will probably be more than only one contributor. Therefore, it is essential to provide them with some basic guidelines. Lots of colleagues deliver great ideas and content for our blog. But everyone has to follow similar writing and formatting patterns for easy readability and consistency reasons. These guidelines determine issues such as markdown style, layout, headings, images, code quotation rules, SEO optimization, and alike.
Two elements are essential concerning content creation:
- Give it a personal touch! There is nothing worse than reading a post without a little wit and charm.
- Refer to other techies and relevant blogs! This does not only enhance your blog’s credibility, but also gives you a better rating regarding search rankings.
Tools for tracking blog performance
We learned about some very helpful tools to analyze blog performance:
Every time a new post is published, we create a heatmap in Hotjar in order to track and to visualize reader behavior. Using Hotjar will let you learn about reading patterns and probably that readers are lazy and prefer shorter blog posts over long ones 😉. Google Analytics, on the other hand, is a very powerful instrument when it comes to measuring blog traffic and analyzing your blog’s performance regarding visitor numbers and bounce rates.
Sharing is caring: the Twitter magic
Every blog post we publish, we also share on our epagesdevs Twitter channel and encourage our colleagues and followers to engage in the sharing fun. To increase our readership, we not only tweet about our latest blog post publications but also promote articles from the archives, publish our job openings or retweet other relevant content for our followers. Twitter is the most suitable social media platform when it comes to getting engaged with the developer community.
Yet, you should not underestimate the additional workload that the maintenance of a Twitter account implies. Statistically, about 92% of companies send out a tweet more than once a day. To engage with and keep our followers up-to-date, we tweet about five times per day - and this even on the weekends.
Using Twitter tools
But of course we do not work on our holy weekends 😉. So, thank god for Social Media tools! Most of our tweets are planned about a week ahead. In order to do so, we use the planning and analytics tool buffer. When first connecting our Twitter account to buffer, it automatically calculated which time schedule would be best to maximize reaching out to and engaging with our followers. Buffer also analyzes which posts performed best and which did not.
Tweet performance is also measured by the Twitter Analytics tool that comes along with setting up a Twitter account. Twitter Analytics helps you to see, which content resonates with our audience, to understand how people interact with your tweets, and to get to know your followers as well as to observe the growth of your follower base.
Another tool that boosted our follower base was IFTTT with its function to set up Twitter recipes. One recipe that was especially efficient, was the one that automatically added those people tweeting about a specific hashtag to a Twitter list. Hence, these added people took notice of our account and were more likely to follow us. Unfortunately, this function was removed by IFTTT as it caused some errors and problems.
So what are you waiting for: start your own company tech blog!
A company tech blog is a great opportunity to carry your development projects out to the public. Also, potential job candidates can check out what you are working on, and thus your blog will be the perfect employer branding instrument. And do not forget about Twitter: Most developers are very active on Twitter! Thus, it is basically a prerequisite in order to engage with the tech community.
Happy blogging!
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