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Leveraging Social Networks to extend your blog

The advent of blogging as a popular mainstream activity signified a new trend in communication. It is now possible for anyone to get her feet wet with self publishing, and free, open source solutions

Author: Samantha Dale
Date: Apr 10, 2011 - 9:18:17 PM

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Leveraging Social Networks to Extend Your Blog

The advent of blogging as a popular mainstream activity signified a new trend in communication. It is now possible for anyone to get her feet wet with self publishing, and free, open source solutions like WordPress have played a large role in that. Traditional journalism has eyed blogs suspiciously, considering them something only untrained, unvetted writers do.

A cold war arose as thetraditional means for disseminating news and information shifted from the front page of the newspaper to the home page of a Web site. Later, the same type of conflict developed between bloggers and communications professionals. When social networks like Facebook and Twitter emerged, the role of the blog changed again.

For some, blogging took a back burner to the means of instant communication, such as microblogsand aggregation tools. For others, social networks gained importance, complementing blogging and blogs.

Today, most blogs, traditional news sources, and public relations firms use social networks to extendtheir reach. Blogs that don't have some kind of feature to share content across social networks areperceived as isolationist and likely have seen a decrease in their traffic over the past few years. It is considered imperative to have integration with social networks to extend the blo's reach.

WordPress, for its part, has many plugins that integrate some aspect of social media. A quicksearch of the plugin repository shows almost 300 varieties of Twitter plugins and almost 100 varieties of Facebook plugins.

It is important to know the technical implementations of social network integration on the growthand sustainability of a blog, and equally important to have a good understanding of the marketingbenefits of these tools.

Realistically, there are plugins that automatically send a tweet of a Post titleand URL every time you click Publish, but does this actually increase the blog's traffic and exposure? As it turns out, less than you might think.

Facebook

Facebook is an ever-evolving source of traffic. To many, it's nothing more than a network to keep friends and family involved in their lives. Others use it to share links from their blogs and provide additional places for friends to comment or voice their approval.

Fan Pages on Facebook centralize and inform readers of new content. It also can serve as a nifty replacement for e-mail marketing services, such as FeedBurner. Facebook simply enables people to join a group or leave a group and, in doing so, replaces the e-mail delivery and opt-in requirements needed to avoid spam.

WordPress provides many options for Facebook integration, all in the form of plugins. You can usesome or all of them to extend the blog to one of the largest social networks.

You need to understand that social Media is a process. Also the Internet is ever changing so is social Media. What works today may not work tomorrow. Social Media is beneficial if you are sharing information with the end user. Always remember, in every internet strategy, Content is the king. If you have your content in place rest everything is not a rocket science.

All you need is to interact with your user, voice their opinions and feedback, give them a reason to follow you or be a part of your community or page and get sticked to it, add relevant content regularly and at the same time. We at anything Net provides a complete social Media Marketing coverage to make your brand stand out.

To Get the professional social Media Marketing Contact Anything Net today on 1300944339 and avail your FREE Web analysis and don't forget to enquire about FREE SEO.

Anything Net is a specialist in social Media Marketing. You can read more about services, discounts and FREE SEO offers at Social Media Marketing located at http://mediasocial.com.au

View all articles by Samantha Dale

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