Making Your Corporate Blog More Social

Note: The following is a guest post featuring helpful tips and tricks to make your corporate (or personal) blog more social media friendly. They come from my friend Dan Zarrella, the mad scientist of social media, who has just published his first book,”The Social Media Marketing Book,” published by O’Reilly. You can order it in the Amazon thingy below. I recommend you do. Dan’s smart and as you’ll see from the tips below, he knows his stuff.

A blog should be your first step into social media and it can form the hub of all your social marketing efforts. There are a number of great ways to integrate a blog with other platforms, including Twitter, social networks, social news and social media sharing sites. Here’s the 8 most important ways.

Auto Tweeting
There are a number of plugins that exist for blogging platforms that will automatically Tweet your new posts. Alex King’s Twitter Tools is one popular example. They’ll often use (by default or through configuration) the prefix “New Blog Post” before the title of the post and a link to it. My ReTweet research has shown that this phrase is one of the most commonly ReTweeted, meaning that auto-tweeting of your new posts is accepted and enjoyed by most users.

The TweetMeme Button
Guy Kawasaki calls the TweetMeme button the most important button on the web today. It’s a simple piece of javascript code that displays the number of times a post has been Tweeted and includes an easy one-click Tweeting functionality for your readers. There’s no reason to not include this on each of your posts, and there is a WordPress plugin from TweetMeme that makes it easy to add.

Social Media Comments
Threaded comment system Disqus will scan Twitter for links to your post and include some of them in the comments section. This is great for extending the conversation about your content into Twitter and providing a level of social proof that other people also like your stuff. There is a WordPress plugin for Disqus, but it can be a little more complex to setup that TweetMeme and Twitter Tools.

Social News Voting Buttons
Some of the biggest traffic generators on the social web are social news, voting and bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, Delicious and Stumbleupon. There are a handful of plugins (my favorite is Sexy Bookmarks) that allow you to include each submission and voting buttons for many of these sites. You should also research your niche and find any topic specific news sites to include buttons from.

Add to Facebook Buttons
Of course the most popular social media site is actually a social network, Facebook allows its millions of users to post links to content they found and liked from around the web. There are a number of plugins (including Sexy Bookmarks) that allow you to add a “Add to Facebook” button to your blog, and since chances are high that your readers have profiles, you should do that.

Pulling Content into a Facebook Page
If you’ve setup a Facebook page as you should for your brand, you can use the Notes app to integrate your blog content. This will pull new posts from your RSS and post them to your page, keeping it constantly updated with fresh content. You can also use Social RSS to pull the content into its own tab with more functionality than Notes.

Pulling Content into your LinkedIn Profile
LinkedIn allows you to specify an RSS feed for your blog and it will pull in your posts and display them on your profile. This is an easy and fast way to spread your content even further.

Embedding Social Media Sharing
Most social media sharing sites, like YouTube, Slideshare and Flickr allow you to embed media directly into your blog posts. This is a great way to spice up textual content and encourage your readers to embed your content on their sites.

Get more tips like this and learn about the full range of social media marketing platforms, tool, techniques and strategies from Dan Zarrella’s book “The Social Media Marketing Book,” published by O’Reilly.

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