Social Web sites that use common formats such as RSS can be easily arranged and connected to spread your message far and wide on the Internet. This post covers some different Social Media tools and “use-patterns” for self-promotion. It is worth noting that most of the tools mentioned here are “best of breed.” There are many other tools that can be used for these purposes. There are also many other ways in which you can use these tools, but the most valuable patterns are discussed here.
Using Social Media and Back Links To Promote A Blog
The promoter pattern is for someone who wants to build back links to themselves by spreading their content as far and wide as possible. These days, one of the first suggestions site owners hear is to install WordPress blog and start blogging. The reason for this is that WordPress is highly SEO optimized and uses things like ping servers to announce to search engines what you have written. WordPress also provides for trackbacks to other blogs, to make sure that all the content that you create is as linked together and discoverable as possible.
To really get your message out there, you have to go and tell the world about yourself. The best way to do that is to use a service like FriendFeed or Facebook to subscribe to the RSS feed that your blog creates and of course build your own back links to conversational hubs like Twitter, Delicious and StumbleUpon to let the world know what you have been writing about.
Monitoring a brand or topic on social sites
The next pattern is a conversationalist pattern. This is for brand managers or anyone with a product or site that wants to know what is being said about their topic area on conversational hubs on the Internet. Three sites hot these days are Facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter. This is where early adopters are likely discussing your brand, and where you can participate in the conversation. Other tools like Google Alerts are useful for monitoring comments about your product or your topical keywords in order to address your customers (or readers) needs.
Spread your message by replicating it on multiple services.
In actuality, you should probably implement all of the patterns describe here. But, if you are more concerned about broadcasting messages out to followers on social networks, Ping.fm is an excellent service for re-posting short messages from a central website. There is also an instant messenger connection, so you can very quickly publish to a wide number of services merely by sending an instant message.
For example, with Ping.fm, you can add Ping.fm as an instant messenger buddy and anytime there is something new to announce about your product or service, you send it via instant messenger to Ping.fm, which then re-posts it on Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter and many other services as a status update or as a micro blog post. This gives you tons of leverage and reach, if you can imagine just posting a very short message and having it re-posted on all these services, without you having to set up any feeds, you just set up your account details with Ping.fm.
Staying relevant by recommending good content
The last hack is gives a publisher tremendous leverage. By connecting your Google Reader “Shared Items” feed to FriendFeed (or a service like TwitterFeed) you can automatically publish new content to your Twitter followers simply by clicking a single “share” button in Google Reader. Given that there is even an iPhone version of Google Reader, this means you can Tweet from the beach by just selecting content (not actually writing anything). This is an important and easy way to establish yourself as a trusted information source with existing and potential customers. Obviously, you want to “recommend” selectively so as to not overload your social network, but the key here is to be a relevant input to your prospect’s information stream.
If you have other Social Media hacks, or favorite configurations, please post them in the comments! The images in this post are also available as a SlideShare Presentation.
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