Being a developer and WordPress coach, I spend a lot of my time either developing my stuff or training people one on one (via Skype) to use WordPress effectively. I don’t spend much time talking about it. This site is an attempt to change that and also, face up to the fact that I don’t tweet enough or do as much on the social media front as I should.
To that end, I need a system for doing this. I simply do not believe in hiring an outsourced army to pretend to be me and do “social networking” on my behalf. Don’t you just hate the lack of authenticity when people do so much via outsourcers or on auto-pilot that you may as well be listening to the cat?
OK – so this is a small piece of my plan (more in a later post). If you have better ideas, let me know.
The First Step Is To Write Posts On Your WordPress Site
In order to systemize and streamline your efforts, everything should stem from a WordPress post. As you write each quality post use it as a trigger for your routine social media output. I have summarised how I am going this in the diagram below, (which by the way uses one of these free graphics ideas).
My Social Media Strategy
You Can Do All This Social Media In 2 Minutes
This above diagram shows how you can send a summary of each post to a minimum of Twitter, LinkedIn and your business Facebook Page. (You can also post to other various smaller social networks via Ping.FM via Hootsuite).
At this time, there is no ability to post to Google+ from PRO Hootsuite – although that may be coming in time. So you will have to do that one separately.
Each social media summary also contains a link back to the original post. Not counting the time it takes to write the the blog post (which you have to do anyway), the social media aspect of it will take you less than 2 minutes but will achieve four things :
- It builds your brand – ie.e gets your face seen
- It gives people a reason to follow you
- It brings you some traffic
- It builds you some links
I think that is 2 minutes well spent.
Use LinkedIn Groups For Traffic And Post Ideas
Within LinkedIn there is a group for every one of hundreds of business niches. Find a handful of groups that are very close your niche and join them. Once in, monitor the groups for questions you can answer.
If you have a blog post you’ve already written that answers the question, answer it briefly within the group, and then link out to your more detailed answer on your site. As they tend to display answers in chronological order, it pays to be first. If you see a good topic for you with no answers then write a fast answer in a new post on your site, then write a short answer on LinkedIn, so you are at or near the top, and links back to your post. Finally as then go back to your post and improve it.
Further Leverage Your Posts
So far all that we have done is use Hootsuite to manage the dispatch of links back to our posts via a number of social networks, and participated in Groups and Answers LinkedIn for exposure, traffic, backlinks and for blog posts ideas.
I suggest that you do two other things that once set up you can forget.
Paper.Li “Newspaper” Publishing
Visit http://www.paper.li and log in with your Twitter credentials. Once you are there you can create a newspaper out of your tweets, other people’s tweets and yours and others’ WordPress RSS feed(s) or any mix of the above. You can also add individual posts as you find them on the web. This creates an engaging central location for all articles and stories relating to your topic. And in doing so, creates long lasting backlinks.
Twylah Topic-Based Twitter Publishing
At the time of writing Twylah is still in beta, but you can apply for an account. While paper.li creates a central collection point for all your tweets and blog feeds, Twylah does something similar for just your Tweets but also has some powerful additional features. It will collect all your tweets that are about the same topic together and organize them over time in to different sections on your Twylah site. This means that people visiting your site can see all your related Tweets together making it a much more readable medium than any of the Twitter clients. This is a dedicated Twitter aggregator and presenter.
Twylah pages are search engine optimized and will give Tweets a longer life and more exposure.
Twylah also has the concept of Power Tweets. It is easy to send a Power Tweet using a button on your browser toolbar at any time when you come across an interesting page in your niche. The Power Tweet does not link directly to the page though. Instead Twylah does two things:
- it publishes your ‘tweet’ about the article on a new Twylah page which has been created to include all your own tweets that are related to the subject of the article
- it then make your tweet with a link to your new Twylah page
