Social Media SitesI really believe in transparency and openness as it applies to me being a blogger and I’m eager to show you what steps I have taken over the past few months to build my blog, following on Twitter, and how I measure my effectiveness. It has been a slow building process, but I’m really excited about where the future is headed. I have received a lot of positive feedback and as always welcome all of your suggestions and constructive criticism.

Using Social Media To Promote Your Blog

There are quite a few incredible web 2.0 tools and applications you can use for free to help expose your blog to the readers you are looking to attract.  Social bookmarkets like AddThis have now been around for a few years and are still a fantastic way to get your content out to a variety of social networks.

I firmly, emphatically, and unequivocally believe that Wordpress is still the superior open source blog publishing platform available today.  With a wide variety of social media plugins ranging from TweetMeMe button integration, Facebook Connect and Twitter Tools, as well other plugins that allow the conversation on your blog to pour out into other arenas, the continuous improvement of Wordpress is supported by a dedicated community of developers.

Creating a Cult Following On Twitter: Manually and Automatically

There is a somewhat time consuming yet high yielding follow farming one can do on Twitter.  Simply by cycling through your followers you can examine the followers of your followers.  By choosing to follow your follower’s followers (no more than 100 per hour) you will begin to receive quite a few auto-follow backs. Try saying that five times fast!

I am constantly amazed by the volume of free, high quality Twitter applications available to help you gain more followers and creditable ones too. TweetSpinner is a fantastic tool that I utilize pretty frequently. It allows users to purge followers who do not follow you back, follow users based on specific keywords, and it also allows users to cycle through multiple descriptions and links presented in your profile on Twitter. I like teaming TweetSpinner up with the free edition of Socialoomph and I validate users who follow me with True Twit, a validation service that keeps rogue spam followers away  while allowing people really interested in what I have to tweet about in.

Tracking Your Effectiveness Through Clicks, Conversions, and Results

I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, Yahoo! Pipes, Twitterfeed, and Common Sense to Brand Yourself on Twitter, how users can take advantage of a free RSS feed manipulator application like Yahoo! Pipes and parse information through Twitterfeed that will be auto-tweeted on Twitter based on the timetable you select.  You can also select rss feeds from sites relative to your blog and post their updates in real-time.  It was really a no-brainer for me recently as I transitioned to Google Feedburner since they now allow users to socialize their feeds to Twitter and provide outstanding data tracking for all of your feeds.  I still use Twitterfeed for auto-retweets because Feedburner still cannot parse rss from Twitter Search correctly.

Toshiba - Toshibadirect.com - AdvertisementWhen I manually send out tweets, TweetDeck is usually my Twitter client of choice.  I believe that it blows all other Twitter clients out of the water.  I also highly recommend shortening your urls with Bit.ly and registering an account at their website. Once you have a bit.ly API key, simply go into the setting on TweetDeck, put in your Bit.ly API key, and all shortened links sent out through TweetDeck will be tracked over at Bit.ly. From that point you will begin to better understand the tone, sources, and length of tweets that are the most effective in generating click-throughs.  In my experience, most followers seem to appreciate you sending tweets out from multiple sources.  I suggest experimenting sending tweets from Twitter’s website, a client, from a mobile device, and url shortening service.  I believe the hybrid model of automating some tweets while manually sending out others combined with multiple distribution channels will give you the appearance of being directly connected even while some of your tweets are being automated.

Trying to Keep up the hustle while carrying out your day-to-day business tasks it would be impossible to expect yourself to maintain a 100% personal, authentic presence on Twitter.  Do your best, automate a little bit, and remember, there is no reason to create stress and friction while branding yourself on Twitter.  Just have fun with it and be yourself.

If you have anything to add, got a question or totally disagree with my approach feel free to share your thoughts with us.

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