Category: Social Networking

WordPress is one of the main choices for a blogging platform on the Internet today. Twitter has quickly become the hottest micro-blogging application.

So can you imagine what occurs when the two meet and marry?

A partnership that creates a most wonderful thing – that’s what!

With the proper plug-ins you can create an awesome social networking tool since both Twitter and WordPress are both strong contenders in the social media arena.

Let’s take a look at some of the most popular Twitter plug-ins that you can use on your WordPress blog to create a social power house match made in heaven.

TwitThis is a simple way for people to send Twitter messages about your blog post, or website. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the webpage and creates a shorter URL using the TinyURL tool.

Then visitors can send the shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their friends on Twitter. Talk about word-of-mouth!

The TwitThis button is a cute little button that you can add to the end of your blog posts making it readily available to your readers once they’ve finished browsing your post.

TwitterFeed is a plug-in that allows you to simply promote your blog to your twitter followers. Much like TweetMyBlog, but not as extensive.

You can customize the message that will announce your blog post to all your twitter pals. Again, a direct URL is provided in the tweet.

TwitterTools is a plug-in that creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. With TwitterTools you can pull your tweets into your blog and create new tweets on blog posts and also from within WordPress.

TwitterBadge is not so much a plug-in as it is a way for you to let others know that you are a user, maybe even addict – it’s ok we won’t tell, of Twitter.

There are many badges from the cute little Twitter bird to the simple badge that basically says, “Hey, look at me. I Twitter too!” When people see your badge and click it, they’ll be taken to your twitter profile.

The bottom line – Twitter is the place to be online, but you may not always be able to be there as much as you would like.

By using the above plug-ins you can automate your own WordPress blog and Twitter to create a beautiful traffic generator an a great way to connect with your tweeps.

Twitter’s got just such a personal feel that complete strangers are always going to be willing to lend a hand. (Biz Stone, who appears not to have a car, has twittered that people keep offering to lend him theirs.)

Ask your followers what sort of posts they’d like to see on your blog then and you’re likely to get swamped with ideas. That makes life very easy for you.

At the beginning of every month, you could just ask your followers what issues they’d like to see covered on your blog in the next few weeks. No more beating your head against the wall trying to think up new content.

And no more wondering if people are going to like the concept either. Before you write about a particular subject, you could just ask your followers what they think.

If everyone says it sounds a bit dull or asks how you’re going to deal with this aspect or approach that problem you haven’t even considered, you can start thinking again.

You won’t have to wait until you’ve been sweating over the post for a couple of hours to discover it isn’t going to work.

And of course once you’ve written it, you can be sure that when you announce that it’s online you’ll have an audience for it.

Announcing your new blog posts on Twitter can help to create a few more views and win you some extra revenue. Using your followers as a resource for post ideas can help to keep your blog focused and informative.

But the biggest benefit that Twitter offers online publishers is always going to be a closer, more personal relationship between you and your readers.

That means that they’ll visit more often, are more likely to act on your recommendations and there’s a greater chance that they’ll link to you. There’s one more way that Twitter can help a publisher though. You can use it as content.

When publishers first started writing blogs, they were meant to be nothing more than online diaries, a place for people to write their thoughts and feelings… and let anyone read them who wanted to. They’ve become much more than that.

Today, blogs are a very effective publishing system. They’ve evolved to become online magazines rather than personal pages. The benefit is that publishers can now write about anything they want — and get paid for it too.

The disadvantage is that they’re no longer personal. If readers used to come to blogs to find what the writer was doing or thinking now, today’s blogs are often not even written by the bloggers themselves.

The first thing that Twitter can do for a blog then is to bring back the personality of the publisher. Bloggers can use Twitter to give readers a peek behind the scenes of their business, provide quick notices about their plans and the posts they’re working on, and answer direct questions put to them by readers.

Sure, you can also do all of this on your blog — and ideally, you should. But when your blog really takes off, it’s unlikely that you’ll have time to respond to every comment your posts receive.

Articles about your blog are also likely to be less interesting to your readers than posts about cars, photography or whatever it is that users are visiting your site to see.

Twitter can gives publishers of blogs an alternative space to get closer to their readers, even when they’re using content written by professional writers.

But what if you want to bring in new readers or increase the views of occasional visitors? Twitter can help there too.

So you can try to build up a follower list that’s packed with people with useful skills, and who have lots of friends. You could also try approaching some of the big names on Twitter.

That’s always going to be harder, not least because you can never tell whether they’re typing their tweets themselves or having one of their assistants do it for them. But can you imagine if you could send out a question asking about a problem with your Mac and had Steve Jobs answer? (Yes, he’s there.) Or more realistically, if you asked for help with your affiliate program and received a response from Shawn Collins? Or if you wanted advice on becoming a professional blogger and picked up a tip from Darren Rowse.

All of those things are possible. That doesn’t mean they’re going to happen — the big names often get lots of questions and rarely have the time to answer them all — but one of the most impressive things about Twitter is the quality of the advice that it’s possible to receive, and the quality of the people who supply it.

Sometimes you don’t need 140 characters to get something incredibly valuable out of Twitter. In April 2008, a graduate journalism student at Berkeley was photographing a demonstration in Egypt.

During the demonstration, he sent one word on his mobile phone to Twitter: “Arrested.”

His followers on Twitter saw the message and alerted both Berkeley and the US Embassy in Egypt. The next day a lawyer hired by the university got him out of jail. (His local interpreter wasn’t so lucky.)

Now I’m not saying that if you get arrested, a quick tweet from your mobile phone will have you back in front of the television before the commercials are finished.

But what is true is that close relationships that develop on Twitter have made it a place where people ask for help on all sorts of topics — and receive it.

That could be advice on where to find a good programmer. It could be a request for search engine optimization advice for your website.

It could even be tips for good products to promote on your pages. It could be about anything at all because just about everyone is on Twitter.

Turning Your Followers Into A Help Desk

The easiest way to find help is simply to ask the people you know if they can supply it. Obviously, this is always going to work best when you have a giant follower base.

The higher the number of people following your tweets, the greater the chances that one of them will be able to lend a hand. That means that as you’re building your followers, it’s worth paying attention to what each of them does and considering the sort of help they might be able to offer in the future.

Choose to follow a Web design expert, for example, and you should be picking up some interesting tweets that could help generate your own design ideas. But if you can get the designer to sign up as one of your followers, then when you ask a question about Web design, there’s a good chance that you’ll get a professional answer.

It’s also worth looking at the number of followers your followers have. If you can get followed by a few people with large audiences, there’s always a chance that your requests for help will be passed along or that their readers will click through to see your tweets.

Followers with lots of followers of their own can provide outlets to plenty of help.

Your wish is to get hundreds of visitors to your website today.  No, thousands. Social bookmarking sites can bring you waves of mind-blowing traffic.

Tech-savvy internet users are actively involved in social bookmarking.  That is, they use a social bookmarking site to bookmark and share pages on the net with others.  If your page gets submitted and it’s liked (and voted for) by many, that alone can easily bring you thousands of visitors per day.

Although you won’t see the highest quality traffic, if you harness the power of social bookmarking, I guarantee you can get opt-ins to your list, gain incoming links from SU (StumbleUpon) users who choose to link to your post on their own sites, and some pay-per-click bucks.  So how do we create content pages we can almost guarantee will be popular?
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Twitter Grader availed access to some several hundred Twitter profiles, including user and traffic growth, “tweet” statistics, statistics on followers and the followed, and geographic data. We tried to enter our twitter id – hooqy and our ranking is 15,395 out of 747,547.

Whenever you are about to do your strategic link bait I would highly recommend for you to place the Digg vote option on your site. You can find the code to add to your site by going here:

http://digg.com/tools/integrate.

When you add it to your site it should look like the above icons. I would recommend putting a “Digg” button at the end of your content so that if the reader finished reading it they can give it a vote if they feel that it deserves it.
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You need to start coming up with ways to find and network with other social
bookmarking users. Start thinking about where these people might hang out and
try to get in touch with them.

Ideally you want to get their email or instant messaging details so you can
contact them and ask them to vote for some of your Viral Magnets should they
like what they see. Obviously you will be returning the favor.

There are a lot of people out there looking for social bookmarking buddies just
like you are so just head out there and try and find them.

Some ideas for finding Social Bookmarking buddies:

• Bloggers are often very active on social bookmarking sites so look for
places where bloggers hang out.

• Hit the popular webmaster forums and look for people discussing the
Social Bookmarking sites and PM them and ask to share contact details.
You might want to write a standard message to send to people.

• Make threads in popular webmaster forums asking to network with other
Social Bookmarking users.

• If you have any online friends you know are active on popular social
bookmarking sites then ask if they know anyone they could introduce you
to who also actively uses the social bookmarking sites.

Aim to build up a list of a minimum of 30 friends that are active on various social
bookmarking sites. Aim for more if you want to.

It’s important to get lots of friends as you don’t want to end up with the same
friends voting for your Viral Magnets all the time.

The fundamental reason why consumers build social bookmarking profiles is to create an identity to share. After doing so, they are able to interact on social networking sites on a regular basis, and marketers can use this behavior to their advantage by:

• Monitoring their favorite brands
• Reading about new products
• Learning about competitor products
• Identifying with other users
• Seeing what friends and family find interesting
• Finding out what the latest trends are
• Identifying new products to purchase

In order to create a profile on many of today‟s leading social bookmarking sites, a user simply creates a screen name, login information, and possibly uploads a picture. Depending on the theme of the site, the user will then go ahead and „upload‟ the relevant information such as links or products to their profile pages. After that, they can become a part of a community.

Community members and leaders rise to the top „ranks‟ of the site based on a variety of factors including:

• Level of activity
• User feedback
• Number of products reviewed or discussions created
• Popularity within the community
• Number of fans

In many ways, social bookmarking is considered to be a form of collective intelligence. Collective intelligence based on a few trends in the marketplace, news, or other information can provide very important data to a third party observer. Filtering data has become even more important today as it provides insights and information on direct experiences with many of the goods and services available in the marketplace.