How to make your blog more social media friendly
TechnologyHaving a blog is a big step in the right direction if you’re looking for ways to immerse yourself in social media. After all, conversations are at the heart of what it’s all about. However, there is much more you can do once you have that blog up and running. You can think of your blog as a hub that connects all of your social media activities, and you’ll want to encourage visitors to interact socially with you in as many ways as possible. Here are some ideas you can run with:
Social Badges, Buttons, and Widgets (Whoa!): Why not advertise your social presence while you have the attention of your readers? There are many different ways to do this.
Facebook recently introduced Fan Boxes for those users with Fan Pages. These allow page administrators to embed the latest activity from their page directly on their website or blog. If you don’t have a fan page and want people to know about your personal Facebook profile, you can also add a badge to your site provided by Facebook. Use the “Create a Profile Badge” link at the bottom under your image.
Facebook Connect is another option: This is a tool that allows software, websites, mobile devices, and more to integrate with Facebook and send information to each other.
Do you want to encourage your readers to follow you on Twitter? A simple Google search shows that there are many different badges to add to your site. Twittercounter.com has one of my favorites: the “big bird button” has a fancy design that shows your number of followers.
Finally, Google Friend Connect and MyBlogLog are two online services that allow web users to connect with their friends on different websites. These free services help foster the community around blogs and bloggers.
Submit Buttons: If you use the WordPress blogging platform, a wonderful plugin to use is “Sociable”. This adds a row of buttons to the bottom of your posts for various social sites and tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, and more. This way, readers can easily submit your content to bookmark, vote, and share.
If you are not a WordPress user, the ShareThis or AddThis buttons are a great alternative.
Easy to share content: It goes without saying that you want to add content to your blog that provides a lot of value to your readers. This is what builds your subscriber base and ultimately determines your success. Some content is more “shareable” than others.
As an example, people love lists. “Top 10 tips on…” “7 ways to…” -you get the idea. Consider adding these types of posts to the mix, because readers are more likely to share them.
Headers are also worth mentioning. Keep in mind what might catch the eye when writing your blog post titles. People are more likely to not only read more, but also share it with others and have those people share it too.
These days, people expect to be able to interact with you when they visit your site. Make it super simple for them and they will come back for more!