You may have already figured out that social media is here to stay. The sites that seemed like a fad back in 2007 and 2008 are now a part of our everyday marketing. When I first came online, at the end of 2005 and into 2006, there was no such thing as social media. That’s right. Twitter started in 2007 and Facebook was only for college students before opening up membership to everyone. Now it’s much easier and faster to get your business going because you have access to your prospects right away.
When it comes to spending time and building a presence, it’s best to only focus on the ‘Big 3’ of social media sites, which are Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. There are more than a thousand other sites, but they have not proven themselves to be worthy of our time and attention.
You can connect your account at EzineArticles.com to all of your social media profiles. Just log in to your account, go into your author’s area, and then click on ‘social media’. You will be able to add your profiles, and also request that your newly published articles be tweeted automatically.
Every time one of my articles is published, Twitter sends out a tweet and people who are following me are able to read it and make comments. This has allowed for some great conversations on my topics, and it affords an opportunity for me to connect with more people who are interested in what I am doing online. Many of my students are using this strategy quite effectively.
I have been known to tweet out an entire article, one sentence at a time, throughout the course of a day. This makes for great comments and interaction with the others on Twitter. It’s all about building relationships, and this has been a way for me to connect with people who are interested in my topic.
Another great benefit of using Twitter to distribute and discuss your articles is that every tweet is indexed by Google. At least once each day I will send out a 140 character or less (the rules of Twitter) tweet that includes my keyword phrase. I also include by URL so that it is picked up by the search engines as well.
Facebook has similar features that enable you to post your article’s link to your wall. They are constantly changing how they do things there, so I will not go into detail here. Simply look for what others are doing in regard to their articles, and add that application to your profile.
LinkedIn started out as being exclusively for corporate types, but had to change its policies and loosen up due to increased competition from Facebook. It is worthwhile to set up a complete profile on this site and to then add people whom you actually know, whether it is online or offline. You can connect your profile here to the other social media sites, making it much easier to spend less time each week with this type of marketing.
