- Blogging Platforms
- Finding the Best Blog for Your Business
- Combining Blogs with Other Networking Sites
- Case Studies
- Summary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Combining Blogs with Other Networking Sites
Your business might want to participate in a number of other social networking sites. For example, if you market one or more products to people in the 18-to-29 age range, you might be interested in marketing on social networking sites such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. If you market products or services to the business community, LinkedIn may be the site you target instead.
Social networking and blogging sites have become much tighter in the past few years, and now it’s easy for you to post a new blog entry and have it post on all your social networking sites so that viewers can read it and also link back to your blog and website. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+ are the big-four social networking sites when it comes to businesses trying to get in front of their customers, so we focus on how to combine blogs with those sites in this section.
Facebook was originally popular with college students who didn’t want to deal with the younger crowd on MySpace and preferred Facebook’s cleaner interface. Eventually, more users of all ages and from many countries worldwide came to Facebook to make it the largest social networking site in the world as of this writing.
Both Facebook and LinkedIn have built-in applications for you to link your blog, which is either hosted on a website or hosted on your own server, to your Facebook or LinkedIn profiles so that you can update simultaneously to all your blogging sites.
You can easily get to the list of Facebook blog applications to review. In the Search box near the top of the page, type blog and then click See More Results for Blog at the bottom of the list. In the Search Filters list at the left side of the page, click Apps. You see the first 10 search results with blog applications you can use (see Figure 3.18). Click See More Results at the bottom of the list to view the next 10 results.
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Figure 3.18. Page 1 of the list of blog applications on Facebook.
When you find an app, click Go to App. What happens next depends on the app you choose. For example, when you click on Go to App, you might see the app developer’s website in the Facebook window.
LinkedIn launched in 2003 as a social networking site designed solely for business professionals. The site has continued to grow in popularity because it’s a place not only for business people to connect, but also for people to search for jobs and for recruiters to find potential job candidates.
LinkedIn introduced its suite of applications in 2008, and one of them is a direct link between your WordPress blog and LinkedIn. Open the Applications in the LinkedIn home page by clicking More in the menu bar at the top of the screen and then clicking Get More Applications. You see two blog applications, as shown in Figure 3.19.
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Figure 3.19. The LinkedIn Applications page with the Blog Link and WordPress applications.
One is for linking your blog on the WordPress.com site, and the other, Blog Link, connects not only your WordPress and WordPress.com blogs but also any blogging platform produced by Six Apart (TypePad and Movable Type) and to other blogging platforms such as Blogger and LiveJournal.
The Twitter website is the most popular website in the microblogging category. Twitter lets you send microblogs, or tweets, of 140 or fewer characters to your Twitter friends. You can also add cross-reference tags to a specific topic so that you can see all tweets from all Twitter users that are related to that topic.
You can also view popular Twitter applications developed by third-party companies. Open the Applications list by clicking the Profile icon to the right of the search box at the top of the screen and then click Settings in the menu. Next, click Apps in the menu that appears below your user name.
The list of applications appears in the list. The problem with this list is that it’s too long and it’s very hard to find blogging applications short of searching for the word blog in your browser.
To avoid undue hassle, head to the twitterfeed site shown in Figure 3.20 (www.twitterfeed.com). This site checks your blog for new feeds at an interval you specify and then posts the information to your Twitter feed so that your followers can click the blog link and read your latest posts.
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Figure 3.20. The twitterfeed website.
Google+
Google’s own social network features individual profile pages and business pages for professional accounts. Sign up through a Gmail or Google account and add contacts to circles, which are collections or albums of contacts such as Family, Work Colleagues, and Friends. Edit privacy settings to share updates with the world or just with people in one of your circles.
To promote your team, you can set up a circle including all members on Google+ and make that circle shareable. Users can then follow that entire circle at once.
You can share blog posts by adding a link to a Google+ update and filling out the description. Share images and link them back to your blog posts or share videos straight from YouTube. Completing descriptions on these items helps them get picked up in the Google search engine, ultimately allowing more people to find and access your content through web searches. Using the Google+ Direct Connect feature, anyone can put a plus (+) sign in front of a Google search and look for content specifically found within Google+.
Upload photos to Google+ to showcase your products and services, as Zen Bikes has done in Figure 3.21.
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Figure 3.21. The Zen Bikes Google+ business page.
Businesses can also allow users and connections to add their own images, posts, and video to their Google+ business page, as they can do with a Facebook fan page.
Google+ also features Hangouts, which are live video chats that are either public or viewable by contacts in your circles. In early 2012, U.S. President Barack Obama hosted his first Google+ Hangout.
YouTube
According to ComScore, YouTube surpassed Yahoo! as the world’s second largest search engine in 2008, a position it still holds in 2012. It would make sense for businesses to tap into this massive network to not only reach its audience, but to bring traffic back to their blogs.
When creating a YouTube account or channel, be sure to fill in all profile information and include links back to your blog whenever possible, such as in the video’s description. This gives YouTube users a leash back to your blog where they can read expanded articles, see photos, and get more information on a topic that perhaps a video briefly introduced.
On a business blog, YouTube videos can be embedded, breaking up text and complementing a story. The embed code for a video can be found under its sharing options on YouTube.
YouTube also keeps statistics on how many views your video received and which websites referred users to your content. These analytic features, combined with analytics tools you might already have in place on your blog, allow you to track both incoming and outgoing clicks for your blog and your YouTube account.
Vimeo
Vimeo is another video-sharing site that is free but also offers a paid PRO version. Although it’s not the world’s second-largest search engine, it does have a strong community of users. You can use tags to describe and categorize your videos, making them visible to searches, and play with the customization settings, which include a logo or watermark overlay for your videos.
You can embed Vimeo videos on your blog and link to your blog from the descriptions on your Vimeo video’s page, as you can with YouTube. However, when your video finishes playing, related video thumbnails appear, and they are always other videos from your account and not from other users (as is the case with YouTube).
Vimeo is also seen as a more professional video service, often featuring video art, high-caliber music videos, digital design features, and documentaries. It’s seen as a creative network for serious video users and developers as opposed to YouTube’s looser audience and producer network with a wide variety of content—from silly cat videos to dancing babies. From scientific slow-motion captures to impressive sound and video quality, the Vimeo user base takes video quality seriously.
Vimeo’s policies prohibit posting content strictly for promotional value so videos that you consider posting yourself should adhere to this standard.
Instagram (http://instagr.am/) is a minimalist social network for photos that can share content with Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and via email. Available for iPhone and Android in 2012, this mobile-only platform allows users to take photos, apply artistic filters, and share in a network of contacts. Contacts can then leave a comment, share the photo, or “Like” the image. The result is a steady stream of images that you can scroll through. Businesses are using Instagram to share mobile photos of products, employees, their neighborhood, and more.
Although the interface is primarily the photo stream, users can still fill out a biography in the User Profile area and include a link to their website. Users can also “check in” to locations, using a geolocation service powered by Foursquare (http://foursquare.com). All photos associated with a place can then be searched and referenced. This can create buzz for restaurants, eateries, cafes, and more as users publish their images and announce where they were taken.
Sign up for Followgram to see a web-page version of your Instagram photos (http://followgram.me/miss604), as shown in Figure 3.22.
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Figure 3.22. Followgram.me page.
Pinterest can be equated to a digital bulletin board or cork board on which users pin photos they have taken, items they like, recipe cards, and more. It’s another purely visual social network that allows for sharing or repinning to your board from another’s.
You can pin items from blogs and websites by adding a bookmarklet to your browser. A bookmarklet is a saved bookmark that shows up in your browser and when clicked, it performs an action. In this case the “Pin It” bookmarklet will pop open a window so that you can “Pin” content from a page you’re currently viewing. Each pinned item contains an image, the name of the original user who pinned it, and a link to the website or blog from where it came.
Pinned items can be sorted into boards—for example, a board for “Food,” another for “Black & White Photography,” or “My Favorite Cars.” Businesses are classifying their products by pinning images to specific boards, such as Ben and Jerry’s “Our Mission,” “Our People,” “Flavor Graveyard,” or “Vermont” boards, as shown in Figure 3.23. You can also allow your Pinterest followers to add their own images to a board. Users can follow single boards or all boards created by another user.
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Figure 3.23. Ben & Jerry’s “Scoop Shops” Pinterest board.
There are outstanding issues with Pinterest with regards to the copyright of images that are shared so it would be prudent to limit your own pinning—the selection of the photo you chose to represent the pin—to an image that you have the right to share.