subject: Leveraging Social Networks to extend your blog [print this page] Leveraging Social Networks to extend your blog
Leveraging Social Networks to Extend Your Blog
The advent of blogging as a popular mainstream activity signified a new trend in communication.
It is now possible for anyone to get her feet wet with self publishing, and free, open source solutions
like WordPress have played a large role in that. Traditional journalism has eyed blogs suspiciously,
considering them something only untrained, unvetted writers do. A cold war arose as the
traditional means for disseminating news and information shifted from the front page of the newspaper
to the home page of a Web site. Later, the same type of conflict developed between bloggers
and communications professionals.
When social networks like Facebook and Twitter emerged, the role of the blog changed again. For
some, blogging took a back burner to the means of instant communication, such as microblogs
and aggregation tools. For others, social networks gained importance, complementing blogging
and blogs.
Today, most blogs, traditional news sources, and public relations firms use social networks to extend
their reach. Blogs that don't have some kind of feature to share content across social networks are
perceived as isolationist and likely have seen a decrease in their traffic over the past few years. It is
considered imperative to have integration with social networks to extend the blog's reach.
WordPress, for its part, has many plugins that integrate some aspect of social media. A quick
search of the plugin repository shows almost 300 varieties of Twitter plugins and almost 100 varieties
of Facebook plugins.
It is important to know the technical implementations of social network integration on the growth
and sustainability of a blog, and equally important to have a good understanding of the marketing
benefits of these tools. Realistically, there are plugins that automatically send a tweet of a Post title
and URL every time you click Publish, but does this actually increase the blog's traffic and exposure?
As it turns out, less than you might think.
Facebook
Facebook is an ever-evolving source of traffic. To many, it's nothing more than a network to keep
friends and family involved in their lives. Others use it to share links from their blogs and provide
additional places for friends to comment or voice their approval.
Fan Pages on Facebook centralize and inform readers of new content. It also can serve as a nifty
replacement for e-mail marketing services, such as FeedBurner. Facebook simply enables people to
join a group or leave a group and, in doing so, replaces the e-mail delivery and opt-in requirements
needed to avoid spam.
WordPress provides many options for Facebook integration, all in the form of plugins. You can use
some or all of them to extend the blog to one of the largest social networks.
You need to understand that social Media is a process. Also Internet is ever changing so is social Media. What works today may not work tomorrow. Social Media is beneficial if you are sharing information with the end user. Always remember, in every internet strategy, Content is the king. If you have your content in place rest everything is not a rocket science. All you need is to interact with your user, voice their opinions and feedback, give them a reason to follow you or be a part of your community or page and get sticked to it, add relevant content regularly and at the same time.
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