Posts Tagged ‘social media’
5 Handy Social Media Monitoring Tools for Bloggers
As a blogger, you’ll have to wear many hats. Spending time to plan your future posts, optimizing your website for the search engines, taking time to promote your posts, and engaging with your visitors are just a few things you will have to do. If you do a lot of these things by yourself, you are going to miss things. You don’t want to miss the coverage your blog gets (and the latest developments in your niche) in the social media. All bloggers should take time to monitor top social sites for story leads, things said about their brands, and everything in between. Thankfully, you won’t have to rely on the good old way of tracking things to keep up. There are many tools that can save you time tracking the social media. Here are 5 tracking tools to get you started:
Tweetwally: a very helpful tool that enables you to keep an eye out for topics that are important to you on Twitter. Pulls everything together and saves you time.
Twittorati: the name should ring a bell. This is Twitter meets Technorati. Bloggers can use this tool to find out about highly popular links. When you are stuck and have no idea what to write about, a trip to this site can help.
Tweetvisor: Tweetvisor is a powerful web-based solution that lets you manage your Twitter account more effectively. It makes it easy to manage your Twitter lists, gain more followers, keep track of what others are saying on Twitter, and even schedule future tweets.
RankSpeed: Search Meets Social Media
Filed under: Social Media Marketing | View Comments
We have been hearing about the idea of smart social search engines for a while now. The current crop of search engines do a decent job of helping you dig up data and find new content to consume. But wouldn’t it be nice if you could have a tool that would analyze all the data and help you make decisions based on social networking communities’ feedback? That’s where RankSpeed comes in. It’s an innovative search engine that lets you find the best products and websites by conducting a sentiment analysis on twitterverse/blogosphere. The search engine goes through user-generated content online and searches for specific keyword phrases. It will then tell you how many people have given positive or negative feedback about the product your are searching for.
Here is an example of the information you will get when you use RankSpeed to search online (in this case I searched for the term “netbook”):
You can update your search results by applying good, popular, and other filters available to you through RankSpeed. You can also change the time-line and the matching criteria for your searches as well. What I like about RankSpeed is that it gives you the source of its information as well. So you can easily figure out who has tweeted about your product or website. It’s also possible to find people who are interested in (or are talking about) your brand.
Fixed Social Plugin: Wordpress Meets Social Media
In a perfect world, your readers will take the time to remember to submit your best content to all relevant social media services around. After all, wouldn’t it be nice if you got some exposure on those sites for all the work you have done without having to lift a finger. That’s actually possible as long as your content provides unique value to your readers. You also want to have the proper tools on your blog to make it easy for your readers to submit your posts to those sites. If you are running your blog on Wordpress, you are in luck. There are plenty of plugins that make it so easy for your visitors to share your content on top social networking sites.
Fixed Social Plugin is an amazing little plugin that is worth a try for anyone who’s looking to get more exposure for his/her content on sites such as Facebook, StumbleUpon, and other top sites. This plugin is very flexible. It lets you pick and choose the style of your buttons and also the ones you want to show on your blog.
Enhance Your Blog with Meebo Footer Bar
A few days ago, I wrote a piece about toolbars that you can add to your blog to promote your Twitter and Facebook accounts and expand your online presences. Meebo’s social bar is one of the better ones on the market today. Meebo not only makes it easy to add a social bar to your blog, its blog toolbar is very customizable as well. So you can pick and choose what you want to promote on your blog.
The customization process is pretty straight forward. All you have to do is drag and drop the service you are looking to add to your footer bar on to your bar. You can also customize the order of your footer-bar buttons by dragging them around. Read more »
How To Add Delicious To Your Blog
Delicious is one of the most underrated social bookmarking services around. There are plenty of social bookmarking services that can drive traffic to your blog, but if I were to rate Delicious among these services, it’d be in the top 2. If you can get people to submit your posts to delicious and help spread the word around about your blog, there is no reason you can’t gain lots of traffic for your efforts. Of course, you need to be involved on Delicious, and your content needs to be top notch. Last but no the least, you need to tag your content properly.
You can always work hours on producing your killer content, and your readers may or may not take the time to add your content to delicious. But you can always push the issue by adding a delicious button to your blog posts to make the process easier for your visitors. I have talked about a few solutions that allow you to display Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious buttons in your posts, but you don’t really have to use a third party solution to get the job done. Delicious has already provided us with a set of free tools that your visitors can use to bookmark your blog posts fast.
One of the easiest way to add delicious to your blog is by grabbing the button code from Delicious. It’s a very simple text button that once clicked it will open up a window that lets your visitors bookmark your posts.
5 Ways To Bring The Social Media To Your Blog
Filed under: Social Media Marketing | View Comments
Here is a question a lot of new bloggers struggle with: how do you drive traffic to a blog? New bloggers are often less patient than the more experienced ones, but the question is very valid. Without traffic, you are not going to get the exposure you deserve for your work, and you are not going to be able to properly monetize your blog. It’d be hard to stay motivated if you work hard on your content only to see others who have much lower quality content get all the exposure and traffic you are not getting. But traffic may be nearer than you think. The social media is a great place to start if you want to significantly improve the amount of eyeballs that visit your pages. Websites such as Digg, Twitter, Reddit, and StumbleUpon are all very effective traffic drivers in their own ways, so you do want to make sure your content is being shared on those networks.
You can always add your content to the top social networking sites by yourself. But a better way to approach this is by giving your audience the tools it needs to spread the word about your content. You’d be surprised how effective this tactic can be. With that in mind, here are 5 methods to bring the social media to your blog:
Digg Digg: one of the best social media plugins for Wordpress platform. It’s very flexible and designed to enable your readers to add your content to their favorite networks fast. Read more »
Make Your Blog Social Media Friendy with Boostpost
In the past few weeks, I have talked about how you can optimize your blog for the search engines and making it future proof. One of the best ways to do that is by optimizing your blog for the social media by giving your readers the option to share your content on top social networking website. Whether you are writing a technical blog or one about your own life, people may find your posts interesting enough to want to share them on Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, and more. Boostpost is a cool handy service that lets you give you users the option to do just that.
As long as you are targeting one of the more popular social media sites on the web, Boostpost should have you covered. It comes with a set of attractive button widgets that you can install on your blog to let your users share your stories and get you more exposure in the long run. Read more »
Promote Your Social Media Profiles with Hi.Im
Filed under: Social Media Marketing | View Comments
I don’t know about you, but I have hundreds of profiles online. Sure, we all are about our Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Friendfeed profiles. But there are plenty of smaller web 2.0 communities that are worth being a part of. If you keep building online profiles, managing and promoting all these accounts could become extremely difficult. Hi, I’m is a cool service that intends to help you organize your online profiles and promote them all from one place.
Here is how Hi, I’m works. All you have to do is create your account and add your social media profiles to it. The service will create your very own URL for you and displays the sites that you have linked with your Hi.Im account on your exclusive page.
There are plenty of services to choose from, and you’ll have a lot of options when it comes to optimizing your Hi, I’m page. You can also change your page’s appearance from the back-end. Here is how your profile would look like (I have not added my picture or all my links as this is just a demo page): Read more »
Blog Link Building 101 – Part 2: Social Bookmarking
Filed under: Social Media Marketing | View Comments
Social bookmarking sites are yet another source of links for bloggers and search engine optimizers. Web services such as Delicious and Mixx can bring you lots of targeted SEO traffic. As long as your listings become popular on delicious, there is no reason you can drive a ton of traffic to your website. Considering that delicious is now closely linked to Twitter, your traffic can multiply in a fairly short period of time. One of the best ways to build traffic through social bookmarking sites such as Digg is by participating in the community and making friends. There are a lot of people who will return you the favor if you help their content go viral. Besides, the more people you know on these sites, the better shot your content gets at going viral.
I recommend you adopt a multi-faceted strategy to take advantage of social bookmarking sites. Sites such as Delicious, Digg, and Mixx are worth being a part of and participating in. You can also add a few niche communities to reach out to others in your niche and get more people to visit your blog. You won’t have time to be a part of every little social bookmarking community, which is why you should use a service such as Social Maximizer to get the job done. There are plenty of social bookmarking submission sites that help you submit your site automatically, but since I haven’t tried them I can’t vouch for them. Read more »
Create Your Social Networking e-Card with Card.ly
Filed under: Social Media Marketing | View Comments
So what is it about all these “.ly” services? Some of the most innovative social media solutions on the web use that domain extension. Card.ly is no exception. It’s a cool service that lets you share your online profiles with your friends, colleagues, and readers easily. All you have to do is sign up for a free account and fill out your information. Card.ly will automatically create your e-card that you can share with others through forums or your own blog. Here are the steps you need to take in a nutshell:
The free version of card.ly does allow you with the code you need to post on forums or your blog to embed your vCard. You get plenty of skins to choose from, and if you decide to sign up for a premium account, you are going to get a whole lot of more skins.
The premium version is much better actually. You can use your own domain name, you get a ton of skins, and you can remove nofollow from your links. You can also add unlimited RSS streams to your card, which comes very handy if you have multiple blog or twitter accounts. All in all, card.ly is a cool little web service that lets you share your profile with your readers or followers. If you have accounts on multiple social networking sites, you might as well use card.ly. The free service will do for most people, but here is what you get with a paid account:
