There are many applications out there that help you update your social networking statuses all in one place (such as TweetDeck, etc.), but there are some disadvantages of updating your Twitter and Facebook simultaneously so that they mirror one another. I have provided these reasons below:

1. Relevance – When you update your status on both services, the events and people that you specify in your status may not be relevant and pertain to the users on one social network, but not to the other.
2. Twitter Jargon – When updating your status on Twitter, your friends on Facebook may not understand the different terms that are native to Twitter’s jargon, such as hash-tags (e.g. #blogging) and @ symbol user tagging.
3. Repetition – With people knowing that you update your status on both social networks, it may detract friends from visiting your account on either network. This is why it is key to have some variety in your statuses on both networks, even if you paraphrase one status differently than the other.

If you are an on-the-go type person, syncing both statuses to the mentioned social networks may be the only way to update your friends about your happenings; however, I am sure there are users out there that would agree with the above premises.

Happy Blogging!

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As many of us know, Twitter is a great way to publicize blog posts. With this in mind, an efficient and convenient way to help spread word about your blog posts via this medium is by installing a service called TweetMeme. This is a site which acts like a social bookmarking niche for Twitter, but instead of the voting system, sites gain popularity by the method of retweeting.

TweetMeme is completely free, and can be added to your blog posts, so that you and/or other readers of your blog can retweet the subject and URL with just one click. With this service, you can see how many retweets the specific blog post has, along with other Twitter users that have retweeted it. As you can see, I have just added the service to this blog.

To install TweetMeme on your blog, I have provided a link to a quick tutorial from the W3CGallery Blog. WordPress users can add this as a plugin to their blog via the WordPress Plugin Directory and enabling it in the Plugins section of the admin panel.

This is a viral (and addictive) way of getting your blog (and blog posts) noticed on Twitter and the blogosphere!

Happy Blogging!

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If you are active on the social networking microblogging site of Twitter, you may have noticed some #wordlesswednesday tags in your feed, along with links to the user’s blog. This is the start of the trend of Wordless Wednesday like the other very popular trend of #followfriday.

What is the point of Wordless Wednesday? Twitter users that are also bloggers take a content-rich picture and then post it on their blog, not specifying any description or caption, but leaving the picture to tell the story in substitute of the description. This new concept from bloggers gives the phrase of “a picture is worth a thousand words” a lot of emphasis.

Want to see examples of what other users are doing for #wordlesswednesday? Check out Twitter search. These search results are also a great way to get inspirational ideas for your blog’s participation in this growing trend.

Wordless Wednesday is a great way to help publicize your blog via Twitter, and also to gain comments from people regarding the picture that you have posted. Feel inspired? Go ahead and join in, and remember to include the hashtag of #wordlesswednesday in your tweet.

Happy Blogging!

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While recently watching the show Diggnation, one of the hosts, Kevin Rose, stated that he has been thinking about redirecting his personal blog to his Twitter page.  At this point the other host on the show, Alex, told Kevin he didn’t think the idea was a good one.  Alex further explained that Kevin would loose money from the ads which his personal site contains.  The debate brought up a good debate, should you give up blogging for Tweeting?

There are some advantages that blogging has over tweeting.  As pointed out by Alex in the debate, there is ad revenue.  If your ad revenue is covering the price of your hosting and domain renewal, you aren’t really loosing any money, and any extra you are actually making a profit.  So in this case, blogging would be a benefit.  Another benefit of blogging is you are not limited by the length of your post.  The 140 character limit on Twitter, really limits what you can express in that amount of characters.  If your blog is like PureBlogging, most ideas can not be expressed in 140 characters.

On the other hand, Twitter does have it’s advantages.  With Twitter you don’t have overhead cost of hosting and domain renewal.  You also don’t have the responsibility to update your blogging software when ever it is updated.  This itself can be a huge benefit if updating your blogging software can be a headache.  You can express ideas that you can’t really create blog out of, is another advantage.

So as you see, blogging and tweeting has it’s advantages and disadvantages.  Each person should access what they think is best for them, but I encourage you to use both.  Use your Twitter account to tell people when you updated your blog, and to give more personal information to your followers, like what you think about the restaurant you just ate at.  Keep your blog to express more insightful information.  One person that has really done well combining the two is Infinity Ward’s (Developers of Call of Duty 4) community manager Robert Bowling aka FourZeroTwo.  His blog is used to keep Infinity Ward’s community up to date with the latest news, while his Twitter account will give small but more personal updates.

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One of the draw backs of using social media as a means of advertising, is updating the page(s) of the social media sites. A lot of the time, you may be to busy with another work related task, or you may just forget. You could depend on your audience to submit your blog posts to sites such as Digg, or Reddit, but that doesn’t mean that it will happen. Another option, you could pay someone to maintain your social media sites for you. This is however looked down upon by many of the social media members. So, how can you for sure your social media page stays up to date? You could allow plugins to do these tasks for you. Most of the more popular blogging software, like Wordpress, are designed to allow third party plugins, and most communities have a lot of very useful plugins that are free. Here are some plugins for Wordpress that allow you to connect to your blog and your social media pages.

Twitme – Twitme is a Twitter plugin which tweets for you whenever you post a new article. The great thing about this plugin is that it automatically creates a short URL for the tweet, and you can format tweet anyway you want. This plugin even allows you to tweet your older entries, which is great if you just created a Twitter account, or if you want to make for sure all your articles have been tweeted.

Twitter Tools – Twitter Tools can be summed up as a conversation between your blog and your Twitter account. Some of the features which Twitter Tools support are tweeting from the Admin panel, tweeting from a sidebar on your blog, create a blog entry from your tweets, and pass your tweets along to other services. Twitter Tools’ ability to create a blog entry from your tweets is really great, since there are times you may want to tweet about a website you saw, but don’t have time to write a full article about it. The only downfall to this plugin is that the author no longer supports the plugin, so you must rely on the community for any issues you may experience.

Social Profilr – If you ever wanted to display all your social profiles on your blog, this is the plugin for you. Social Profilr adds links to all your social profiles via a sidebar widget. This plugin seems to benefit the visitor more than you, but this isn’t the case. If the visitor chooses to follow you on a social media site, then their friends can see your profiles also. Which if your profile is about your site, then there is a chance the visitor’s friend will visit, thus spreading your site’s name.

Sociable – Sociable is a popular plugin that allows users to submit your site to multiple social sites via the click of a button. The plugin includes most of the popular social sites, like Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, but also includes less popular sites like Blogmarks. With Sociable, you are encouraging visitors to submit your site to their favorite social media site, it may also push those visitors who thinks it is to much work to submit articles also.

Digg Widget – This is a simple sidebar widget which allows users to see the last 10 articles from your site which have been submitted to Digg. If the visitor is a Digg user, this will make it easier for them to find posts which have already been submitted to Digg.

Digg This Badge – This plugin allows you to display the famous “Digg This” button in your article. Digg This Badge, interfaces with Digg’s API, and allows you to choose when to display the Digg badge, based on the number of diggs an article has. This is another great way to display how popular (or unpopular) an article is on digg.

We covered Digg, and Twitter heavily in this article. But if your site does well on Reddit, or Stumbleupon, then head over to Wordpress’s plugin page (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/) and search for specific plugins based on those social media sites. We just gave examples of what the community provides. There are way too many social sites for us to attempt to list a plugin for them all. If you have any other great social media plugins, tell us about them in the comment section.

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One of the popular trends on the web right now is social media and/or social networking, and it looks like there is no stopping it in the near future. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit are among the many sites which are leading the way with social media, but is there a way for you to use social media to your advantage?

There are a few ways you can take advantage of social media for your blog. Sites such as cracked.com seem to be on Digg’s front page daily, and this success shows. Blogstorm.co.uk recently released a list of 100 sites based on how often they reach Digg’s front page. Cracked.com was ranked 26 on this list, and looking at Alexa’s stats is seems that it maybe a lot of where their visitors are coming from.

So, what advantages does social networking provide for blogs, and what are some ways to use them effectively? The most obvious advantage is traffic directed toward your site. From this traffic you can make some revenue, which is the goal for most sites. You can also build a loyal support base via social media. Looking at any of the social media sites, you can tell that they are very loyal to their brand. Just visiting any of the sites, you will notice arguments like Facebook is better than Myspace, or Reddit has a better user base then Digg, and so on. This loyalty is something that takes large companies years to build, but via social media you can do the same thing in less time.

In order to effectively use social media, you have to be part of the community. As we already stated, the communities are loyal for the most part, but they are not welcoming to outsiders. If you were to submit a blog entry to Reddit, or Digg, it will most likely get lost in the shuffle. If you were to only use Twitter to announce a new blog article, your chances of looking interesting to other users can be very low. So how do you break this trend? You have to become part of the community. This can require a lot of time. You will have to build a relationship with the users, and get to know them. This is a key feature that most people who use social media for advertising don’t fully understand. Most people are drawn to social media because it is a “free” way to advertise. Then they wonder why their plan doesn’t work, when they are not apart of the community. Some ways to start to fit into the community is simple, acknowledge the community. Comment on stories at Reddit, reply to tweets on Twitter, send personalized messages to people on Facebook. After you build a good network, then start linking to your blog, but continue to communicate in other ways. You can send a personal tweet or message telling a user that you thought they would be interested in an blog entry you posted, but only do it when you really mean it. After doing this, you have to remember not to “abuse” the community. After building friends, don’t send them links to every blog article you wrote. Respect the users of the service. Remember the saying “Respect is a two way street”, and in social media this is really the case. By not spamming the people on your friend’s list with every article you write, you are respecting them. When you actually do send them a link, they are more likely to read the link.

Don’t seem like you are in the community just for advertising. If you are using Twitter, make tweets about other subjects. On Digg, submit stories from other sites, which you truly find interesting. Making yourself not look like a person spamming just one site, will allow you to build friends also. A person may enjoy the article enough to look at your past submissions, and if they feel like there is something in common they may check out your profile more often.

Write about something the community will like on your blog. If you know that most of your followers on Twitter really like 80’s TV show, talk about those shows and be creative when doing so. Talk about how you think the MacGyver would respond to current events, or how a reality show would be if the A-Team was part of it. If people find your site interesting, and can connect to the content, they will be willing to look at what else you have to say. Posting an article on Digg about how to rebuild a car motor wouldn’t do as well as how to hack an electronic road sign. This is another aspect where being active in the community helps you understand what will do well on a social network site.

Make your site social. Allowing the user to interact on your site via comments, or a forum will make the user feel part of the site. They will be able to voice their ideas about the blog entry, and in doing so it will start to build your own community. This also allows you to get feedback from the community. If you post an entry that you thought was great but the community says they thought it was horrible, then you know not to write similar articles in the future.

Just like wine, it takes time to get the best out of social media. If you are expecting that social media will make a large influx of traffic to your site over night, then you should not use social media as a mean to advertise your site. Social networking doesn’t make advertising easier, it just makes creates more of a level playing field for the small blogs. With hard work, social media can be part of a site’s success.

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For those of you out there who use the Twitter social-networking blogging site, I have specified some more tools that I have come across recently to enhance your Twittering experience:

• Twellow – Want to find friends/followers near you, or that share the same interest as you? This service acts as a Twitter directory of users that are sorted by categories, and you can find users near you using this service’s TwellowHood feature.
• Twply – Want your @replies forwarded to your e-mail? This opt in service will allow you to receive direct messages that are sent to your account also to your e-mail. This is a good service if you are a Twitterer on the go.
• @spellingbot – Need something spelled, and don’t have any spell checking software around? Send an direct message to @spellingbot and your word in question will instantly be corrected.

Happy Blogging!

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Ever since the large social networking site Facebook developed and added a Notes section to their interface, it has gotten a lot of attention from the service’s users–bloggers and non-bloggers alike.

The Notes composition section (pictured above) provides a look much like any other blogging platform’s compositional area, including both a Subject line and a multi-line text area for the content/message.

Notes has become a very popular area on Facebook, where users post quizzes, rants, memes, and so forth. With this premise, the usual FB users engaging in the Notes section would not consider themselves as bloggers, but those who are involved in the blogosphere with other blogs (not associated with FB) tied into their profile do admit to themselves as blogging.

What are your thoughts on Notes on Facebook and how it ties into blogging?

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The blogger’s sidekick site: Twitter now has a feature where you can “retweet” a tweet.

For those of you somewhat lost on what Twitter is, it is a social networking site where you state (in 140 characters or less) what you are doing. Making this service a “mini-blog” from a social networking aspect.

Retweeting is when a Twitter user forwards one of their follower’s tweets and publishes it on their feed. An example of this is below:

RT: @KevnBriggs It's definitely cold outside

This method also gives credit to the Twitter user that originally made the Tweet that you are broadcasting.

I just learned about this method a little while ago, and thought I would share it with you.

Happy Blogging!

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If you are either a new blogger just getting introduced to the blogosphere, or you’ve been blogging for a long time and want to gain more visibility and attention to your blog, I have provided a few tips to give your site a better audience.

• Learn SEO – SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is key for the placement and appearance of your site on search engines. There are specific rules and guidelines to placing your blog higher within search engine results pages. Want to know more about SEO? WebProWorld is a great resource and forum for everything SEO-wise, and a great place to ask SEO-related questions.
• Social Media/Networking – If you are involved in social media/networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, these are great places to help promote and advertise your blog. A trend that I have been seeing on Facebook is that users have been syncing their blog posts to the Facebook Notes section of their profile, and adding applications to their profile page like Blog It!
• RSS Feeds – RSS feeds are always beneficial to add to your blog. These allow people who read a lot of blog posts to view and organize them all in one place. This helps keep the user interested in the content of your blog.
• Article Directories – Submitting your articles to various article directories will help the publicity of your blog, and compete with other writers as your articles will be placed by category. If you would like to submit to a vast amount of directories in a small amount of time, you will need to subscribe to a submission service (e.g. SubmitterBot) that will automatically submit your article to different article directories for you.

Happy Blogging!

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