So many of us love Facebook for personal use and staying in touch with friends. What if you could use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and other social media channels to increase blog traffic and build a stronger community? This session will be presented by Emily Sandford, weight loss blogger behind Skinny Emmie. Emily owns Authentically Social, a social media marketing agency. If you have specific topics you would like her to cover, leave a comment here or tweet her @skinnyemmie. Her presentation also will be available on her blog on Sept. 28 at http://www.skinnyemmie.com/fitbloggin-presentation
The predicament: Social Followers or Blog Traffic?
GET YOUR BLOG READY
• Create engaging content
• Let people know where to find you
• Enable social sharing on posts (Digg Digg, Shareaholic, PinIt, ShareThis, etc.)
• Configure settings to include FB page and Twitter handle
• Ask questions at the end of each post to encourage discussion — this can translate to social prompts as well
• Make things ridiculously easy for the reader
SHARING YOUR CONTENT
Easy to remember strategy — The Who, What, When, Where, Why, How
Who: Who is your audience? #hashtags
What: What is your message? Description
When: When is the best time to share?
Where: What networks will you share with?
Why: What is your intention? Comments, traffic, more shares, etc.
How: What is the easiest way for you to share your content (Manually, syndicated, both?)
SHARING AND OPTIMIZATION
• Length of message: Short and sweet, but not vague
• Type of message: Text, link, photo, video
• Hashtags: Help non-followers find you
• Twitter Chats
• In person meetings/events: like @fitbloggin
• Manual posting versus automation versus apps
(Directly on network/Feedburner, RSS … Facebook to Twitter to Twitter Apps/Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Sprout)
INTENTION & INTERACTION
(A story of social faux-pas)
— Connect, don’t vomit (and make people wish you’d shut up!)
— Give back the same time to your readers that you’re asking of them to read and interact.
TOOLS FOR EFFICIENCY
Crowdbooster (analytics on reaching the most people), Google Analytics, Buffer, Shareaholic, Pinerly, Facebook Insights, HootSuite)
NOTE: Be informed on the tools out there that will help you drive traffic to your blog.
FINAL THOUGHTS
• Don’t sacrifice authenticity
• Don’t become a robot
• Don’t become a social billboard
• Share authenticity and intentionally
• If you have certain posts that are really important for you to share ask others for help … but don’t cry wolf!
Q&A
Special application you’d use for Pinterest to capture the proper information?
Go to Pinterest “Goodies” and it has a PinIt! Button embed code.
How do you feel about people regurgitating quotes and things on their Facebook pages.
Try to post original things. I would rather create great content on my own. What do you think is most important to you?
This session was captured by Andre of Mission Meltdown.
[…] a freelance writer…but I was sitting and listening to Emily’s (@skinnyemmie) presentation on social media and I was looking at her PowerPoint and I was kind of having a panic attack. “I should have […]