Archive for Social networking
What you do in life matters… a Monday morning motivation
Posted by: Wendy LugoSantiago | Comments (5)In your personal life: the other day, when I drove my son to school, it started raining buckets out of the blue. As I pulled closer to school, I saw a man walk with his daughter and his toddler in the rain. He was trying to keep his children dry with one small umbrella and that didn’t work very well since he was carrying the toddler. I pulled to the side and asked him if he was walking to the school (the street led straight to it). When he said yes, I asked him if he wanted to have a ride. He was so happy to be able to bring his daughter dry to school. I felt happy that I could help him. When was the last time you helped somebody?
In your business life: In social networking, a lot of times, we write our posts and tweets and post them, but we are not doing much else. Doing this, we are not getting the results that we wish for. The big problem is that “build and they will come” does not work in social networking. We need to take the time and look for pages to comment on or find tweets to respond to. We expect other people to come and take action. But the secret is that we are the ones that need to take action. Go and find a Facebook page to comment on or a tweet to reply to today.
You decided to start your blog and did your research. You have a great topic and a new angle on it. The blog is looking good and there is some content in it. SEO is done. Keywords are in place and tags added. How do you get people to find your blog now?
You can just wait until the search engines crawl your blog and appear in the search results. It might take a while, but it is a possibility. Or you can speed up the process with these 3 easy to follow suggestions:
First, submit your blog to blog directories. Just Google “blog directories” and you will find a lot of them. Make sure that it is a good blog directory by looking if they have the blogs categorized, the ability to subscribe to your RSS feed and how strong the page rank of the directory is. Some good ones are: http://www.technorati.com, http://www.blogarama.com and http://blogcatalog.com. By adding your blog to a blog directory, you add to your blog’s SEO because most of the directories are well indexed by the search engines.
Second, use social bookmarking sites like http://www.delicious.com or http://www.digg.com.
Finally, integrate your blog with your social networks. Connect your blog in your LinkedIn profile, add it to your Facebook page and feed it to Twitter.
Now your blog is all over the web. People will find it. Make sure you keep the content great and fresh. Have fun!
Social networking can only be effective if you are authentic. That is a fact. Now, you could argue that automation is not authentic and goes against this very important fact. The solution is that it depends on how much and what you automate. In order to be successful in social networking, you have to spend quite some time on it (a recent study found an average of 6.5 hours a week are necessary to be successful). Judging from my own workday, it is hard to spend such a long time on socializing. In order to manage your time better, you don’t have another choice but to automate certain steps of social networking. Some of the tasks in social networking lend themselves perfectly for automation, like sending DMs (direct messages) to new followers on Twitter, pinging out your blog post, distribute your blog post through RSS to all of your social networks, distributing your content to the social media sites and a lot more. Here are my top 3 picks for the automation of social networking:
1) Onlywire.com
With Onlywire you can automatically submit your content to over 40 social media sites. You can submit your status updates, articles and blog posts. It takes initially a little bit of time to set up, but once setup it really saves you time.
2) SocialOomph.com
SocialOomph is perfect to send automated DMs (direct messages) to new followers. Additionally, the tool also track keywords. You are able to schedule tweets with it as well, but I would use that sparingly.
3) Twitterfeed
Twitterfeed will link your blog to your Twitter profile, your Facebook profile and your Facebook pages. You can also link to ping.fm and use ping.fm to distribute your blog further in the web (instead of using Onlywire).
