Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

Chatting with a designer colleague last week, he wanted to explore just how useful WordPress can be in bringing together the various aspects of social media these days. How can the power of WordPress be harnessed with Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and goodness knows how much more?

Perhaps the most immediately obvious channel that WordPress can include is Twitter – not only by encouraging us to “tweet this” but also showing us a feed of tweets (hopefully relevant!), encouraging visitors to “follow me”, and more.  And now with Facebook joining in, we can show that we “like” a blog post to all of our friends and connections – sharing our information with those that are happy keeping their social media within the one place.

And then there are our favourite online networks, forums and the link – YouTube, MySpace, LinkedIn, 4Networking, Ecademy – there are many to suit our myriad profiles.

The leap from LinkedIn to Facebook is not going to suit everyone, so by including both on your blog – using your blog as the central hub – you appeal to your wider audience. Give your readers what they want – some like Facebook, others like LinkedIn, some will only see your YouTube video if you include it elsewhere, and  Twitter – which some of us love and others cannot see the point.

Use your WordPress blog as the hub and that way:

• you can be sure of owning the content
• bring together comments,
• update each of the online platforms you use
• benefit from the activity for your website (rather than someone else’s!)

The thing to do is indeed make use of the forums and platforms, but bring it “home” so that your blog and website gets the benefit too.

Hope that’s helpful – if you’re not sure, let us know and we’ll knit more…

Babs

There are many WordPress plugins that enable you to harness the power of Twitter; the following are a few that you may find useful: 

TweetMeme Button
Used here on blogmistress.com – the retweet button up in the right hand corner of posts! It’s really simple to use and let’s anyone retweet your post. So if you’re reading this – click it to try it out

TweetMeme Twitter Follow Button
Places a follow me button on your site. Nice and simple – install this plugin, go to widgets and place in your sidebar then add your twitter username.

WP to Twitter
We mentioned this in a previous post – What, Why, How – WordPress Plugins and having had a look at the settings and trying it out it’s very handy for automatically tweeting your published posts.

This plugin can send a default message when new and edited posts/pages are published but also you have the option of writing a custom tweet for a post.

It’s all pretty simple to setup, there are advanced options but to test this out I was happy with the default settings and just popped in my twitter account username and password.

And if you want to show your Twitter stream in your sidebar, there are a number of plugins available, but we like the look of Twitter Widget Pro – partly because it has been tested on the latest version of WordPress (at time of writing – some weeks into the latest release) and because it handles twitter feeds well, including the @username, #hashtag, and link parsing, amongst other things.

Of course, as with all plugins, the thing to do is search for your ideal plugin yourself, taking into account when it was last updated, how many people have downloaded it, and even popping to the WordPress.org site to view comments, etc.

Have fun!

Writing a blog isn’t rocket science.  It can be formulaic if you want, it can be as complex as you make it. The more complex something is, the less it’s likely to happen. That’s why we are not all rocket scientists. Looking after several multi author blogs one of the things the bloggers say from time to time is – What do I write and I have run out of things to write.

Crowdsourcing via twitter, Facebook and Forums really comes into it’s own here. People who know you through the forums, often make excellent suggestions as to what to blog about next.

Let’s say you have plenty of inspiration, how do you actually write a blog?

I like to think of it as a story and in the blog you tell that story. It’s readable, it hooks you in, you learn something and you get to give immediate feedback in the form of a comment. If only books were that good

What sounds better?

Yesterday I did 6 deliveries for 4 new customers in a white transit van

or

Yesterday was a busy day for our same day courier business. We had 4 brand new customers to deliver for and they all had different requirements meaning our organisational skills were tested – you will be pleased to know they were not found lacking!

I can expand and say how I came about those customers, what sort of things they needed to have delivered, what items they were and if it was a confidential delivery, I can say that too. The blog will show future customers and regular readers you know what you are doing, or you don’t know what you are doing.

If you don’t know what you are doing, don’t blog about it as a factual blog. Make it a “what if” blog…

What would happen in your business if you took on 4 diverse customers from a variety of backgrounds? How would you cope? Is it some businesses can deal with multiple customers better than others? Let’s explore that further, the multiple customer thing. In this scenario your blog is asking for advice and if you tweet it out or share it on Facebook, you may get comments that will help you.

Back to writing that blog…

• Tell the story and tell it as best you can.

• Be as open and as honest as your business allows.

• Just write.

In telling the story you describe the features of your business and how a client has benefited from them, the story aspect makes it readable, the blog and your company become memorable by default. Having to read lots of facts and figures is more palatable if it is part of the blog. A list of figures will get glossed over and some of the impact of them lost. Experiment, tweak, test – see what works for you and your readers.

Being open and transparent, is a good thing, your readers will identify with it and you become a credible source of information to them. Over time this will enable you to build a strong relationship with them and they will trust and recommend you and your blogs.

Just write. Seriously. JDI. So many would be bloggers spend hours worrying over the colour of their blog, spelling, what to say – it’s displacement activity. Do you think this post looked like it does now whilst I was writing it? It was one huge block of text and when I finished. &00 ish words and no capitals and very little punctuation. I started adjusting, tweaking  and formatting it. Remember the power of JDI, don’t get over zealous and edit the life out of your blog and if you make a typo or spello, it is not the end of the world. If someone comment s to correct you, they are engaging. It may not be the type of engagement you want. But it’s a start.

Despite what people will tell you, you will get better with practice. You will cringe at some of your early stuff – even if it’s very good. Writing blogs is like using a muscle it gets stronger with use. So use it.

Sarah

Useful further reading

• Six @ Six: 6 Pioneers in Corporate Blogging
• Promoting Personal vs. Professional sites and posts
• Win Copies of John Jantsch’s “The Referral Engine”

The blogmistress and I, have just come back from the first Kaslers Tweet meet in Kent

I promised the twitter names of all who attended that I had… so go follow and send them a tweet to say hi

• Chris Lodge – @caraccidentaid
• Barry Nuttley @greenenergychap
• Adam Cowper Smith @adamcowpersmith
• Luke English @EnglishMedia
• Helen Vining @thecocktailclub
• Mark Jenner @markdjenner
• Sue Robinson – DTF
• Janet McKenner @delicakesME19
• Rodney – DTF
• Ian Smith – DTF
• Alastair Wood @Alastairwood
• Brian Tidey @briantidey
• Anthony Draper – DTF
• Stephen from Kaslers – Dtf
• Peter Eves – DTF
• Michael Breeze @michaeldbreeze
• James Primarolo
• Justin Somerville-Cotton @dunbarconsult
• Mark Loughlin @talladviser
• John Botting @johnbotting @4networkingkent
• Julie Blunt – DTF
• Mark Hickman @lovetoddydotcom
• Robert Killington @vatark @4ncrawley
• Kevin Arrow @Freight_rescue
• Marc Lemezma @lemezma @4nMaidstone
• Mike Gilbert – DTF
• Dermot Sheehan – DTF
• Babs Saul – @babssaul @blogmistress
• Sarah Arrow – @Essex_courier

DTF – Details to follow

I will be contacting everyone via email with a download of the Blogmistress’s guide filled with tips and useful info.

Lovely to meet you and put a face to the twitter name

Sarah

PS: If we missed you and you were there, please add your twitter name below – thank you (Babs)

It can be hard to formulate a comment sometimes when you are reading a blog, and if I can’t make a comment and I like the blog the next thing I look to do is share the content as a way of saying thanks to the writer.

I recently discovered Facebook sharing   this button when added to your site allows the post to be posted to your Facebook profile so those that see your status updates might like it and have a look. I have used this one a lot lately and now I look for it more when I am looking to share posts.
If you want to try it, you can download it from here and then upload it to your plugins  http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/facebook-fb-share-wordpress-plugin.zip

I still love the most popular plugin that Babs installs on every Blogmistress blog, the TweetMeme button that little green button will tweet the blog from your twitter account sharing it with your followers and helping to attract people with similar interests to you. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweetmeme/ It’s not just me who loves it, it’s installed on 100,000 other websites who want to make sharing their content easier.

But what about sharing buttons? How do they work for you? You see, many sites have the addthis sharing widget and I have never used it, not once, not ever. Even though I can still share on Twitter and Facebook using it, for me there is something about the button that just makes me want to press it!

More enticing is Sexy Bookmarks, anyone use that? I saw it on someone else’s site (and I forget who, as I look at so many) and it said “Caring is Sharing” and then there is a drop down box with just about every share site in the world on it! They also have one that says “sharing is sexy”. How can you not use that?

Last, but by no means least – has anyone installed a Google Buzz button yet? I tried it on one of my blogs, but it conflicted. If you use it – how does it work for you? Love it or Loathe it?

Sarah