Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match! Find me a find! Catch me a catch!
Ya, okay, you get the point.
Social networks are taking over, and I love the sweet poison of dictatorship! What’s even better is that with the development of these technologies, we have more control and more options. To condense our lives from the clutter of different sites, we can marry all our networks together. This is beneficial if you do PR or if you simply have important issues to blog about, and you want people to read your posts more often.
I married my Twitter to my blog by allowing tweets to surface on my homepage as I tweet them. In turn, I also provide links to my blog posts to direct my followers to my blog. It’s all so effortless!
Step One: Put a quick tagline next to the link in Twitter before you tweet it. This lets your users know that it’s not spam. If your tagline is catchy enough or interesting enough, then followers will check it out. Try using the rules of a newsworthy story (Journalism) to ensure a great tagline (or even great blog posts).
Step Two: Amateurs, don’t post the entire link. Don’t you know Twitter only has 140 characters? Don’t waste space! That’s what your blog is for, right? Use a site like bit.ly to shorten your URL.
Step Three: Proofread. There’s nothing worse than a professional who loses all credibility with errors. They happen to everyone, so don’t think you’re imune. Proofread both your blog posts and tweets.
Step Four: Follow step one and step two frequently. The more you blog and tweet, the more likely people are going to check you out.
So, go ahead and marry your social networks already. They could use the tax break. ;]
Very nice, quick tutorial on connecting social media. A common misconception is that you have to do one or the other (blog or tweet). As you explained, it’s actually quite easy to do both and not have it be any more effort than doing just the one.
The challenge becomes determining how _best_ to use each medium effectively given its particular strengths without duplicating content across both. As I think you’re doing, readers and followers should see clear distinctions between how you’re using your blog versus how you’re using Twitter, but also see that the mediums are integrated in a meaningful, organic way. It’s common to see people, especially marketers and PR folks, just use their Twitter accounts to promote their websites, blogs, press releases, etc., rather than engaging their followers in a conversation.