making your online life easier

Making your online life easier

Attract Readers; Gain Impact

Remember the ‘social’ bit


Social media are platforms for social networking.

This thrives on people being sociable, rather than promoting and advertising.

The process works by creating relationships with your potential customers by giving rather than receiving.

It requires getting your followers, friends and contacts, who may not be your customers, to know, like and trust you.

And once they understand what you’re about, then they can share, recommend and refer you to potential customers.

Frequency versus consistency


Bombarding your social followers depends on these factors:

• Which platform you’re using

Twitter works better with multiple updates, due to its fast moving nature, whereas LinkedIn Groups require a more leisurely pace to develop discussion and conversation.

• Repetition and duplication

Google tends to penalise duplication of written content, whereas repetition in a variety of ways and formats can attract audiences who respond better to different stimuli.

Spam alert!


Duplication, insistent repetition, limited content of no value, over-use of links within content, links going to dubious destinations – all this could cause you to be viewed as spam.

• Vary the content you produce to promote your blog

• Consider the other readers who may not be interested in your blog; don’t annoy them unnecessarily

• Be aware of the longevity of your content’s visibility; leave suitable time gaps before repeating your promotional activities

• There are exceptions: in Twitter you can tweet your posts as many times as you like!

Automation via RSS


RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, allows content to be distributed, or fed, to other locations immediately after it has been published.

• Blog posts fed to subscribers as email notifications (via Feedburner, Feedblitz or the JetPack plugin)

• Blog post updates in social media via sharing applications or social sharing buttons

• Blog post links into listings in blogrolls or reader feeds

Share both outwards and inwards


Social sharing buttons are easily found on WordPress blogs in many designs and formats.

There are many plugins that will enable you to place them on your blog. You decide which one you like best, or performs best.

RSS also brings up content from social networking sites to show on your blog, such as my Twitter feed here.

You can use RSS to showcase your other content and display it on your blog, to gain more followers and increase your reputation.

Read other blog posts


A successful blogger will read extensively, to gain more knowledge, get inspiration for more ideas, and keep up to date.

You can access relevant blog posts in your industry or niche through readers or syndicated sites.

• Feedly.com is a RSS reader site

• Pocket.com is somewhere to store posts to read or refer to later

• Scoop.it allows you to collect suggested blogs for others to read

• News360.com and Business2Community.com are examples of syndicated sites where you can find information to learn more and resources to help you curate better posts

Join the bookmarking community


Bookmarking is another kind of social networking.

Bookmarking sites (for example, Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit) are venues where you can submit your posts to get readers.

However, the technique is to give before you receive:

• read blogs in your industry, niche, of interest, for knowledge, news and resources

• provide helpful and constructive comments on them

• create a relationship with those authors

• then submit your post. Your friends will reciprocate your comments and share it amongst their contacts

Monitor with Hootsuite


There are applications you can sign up to, to monitor your social media activities in one place.

Hootsuite.com is the most commonly used platform, which allows you to monitor all your social networking sites at once, presented through columns or ‘streams’ that show the data in real time and allow you to respond accordingly.

Monitor with TweetDeck


For people who prefer Twitter, there is TweetDeck.com, which also presents activities in ‘stream’ columns, gained by segregating your contacts into lists or following hashtags.

Share with Buffer


If you want to collect interesting posts and share them on social media, the best tool for this is Buffer.com.

This application allows you to schedule when you share content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.

You can choose the optimum times when your readers are most likely to be online. This knowledge can be acquired through Tweriod.com.

Schedule with SocialOomph


Even though many people prefer to use Hootsuite, the tool I use to schedule my tweets in advance is SocialOomph.com.

You can also schedule for your other social networking sites and much more. I find it particularly useful to schedule a lot of tweets at specific times, and it’s very easy to repeat the process on different days.

Shorten your post’s URL


You will need to shorten the URLs of your blog posts, not only to take up less space in your updates, but also to avoid repetition and duplication of content.

The most commonly used is bitly.com, which also offers tracking facilities to see who has clicked on your tinyurl.

A lot of sharing and scheduling applications offer their own tinyurl service, but you can search for others as well.

• tiny.cc• tinyurl.com• is.gd• ow.ly

Action Time


Action 1: Add social sharing buttons to your blog, to make it easier for your readers to share your content.

Action 2: Choose a bookmarking site, and start to make connections by reading lots of blogs and commenting on them.

Action 3: Go to Tweriod.com to see when your followers are more likely to be online. You will then know when is the optimum time to be active on social media, or when to schedule your posts.

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