Combine social media and blogging

- This topic is the integration of social media and blogging. If you truly want to rock social media, you have to integrate your blog into it. And I could also say the flip side, that if you want to truly rock blogging, you have to integrate social media. So these are top 10 tips. Tip number one is, of course, to first understand that blogging, plus social media equals amplification. It's a good thing. If you just did a blog and didn't have social media, you wouldn't get the attention. And if you just had social media, but not a blog, you wouldn't have the content. So tip number one is you have to put two and two together, that the blog has the content, social media draws the traffic to it. Social media draws the traffic to it, you better have content, tip number one. Tip number two is unlike a blog where you post something once and you can never repeat it. That's not true with social media. With social media, you can repeat your tweets. So tip number two is if you have this great blog content, don't be afraid to write multiple tweets pointing people to that blog content. They can be identical, as I said, three times, eight hours apart, or you can change them up a little bit every time. If you really want to do this right, change them up and put in a new graphic, point back to the same blog post, you'll get much more traffic for your blog. Tip number three, be sure you test what a pin of your blog post will look like. So this means you go to Pinterest, and use figure out that when I pin my blog post, it looked great. A lot of times, I find these great stories that I want to pin. I go to Pinterest, so I use the Chrome extension. I click on the Pin It button and I look at the pictures that come in and it's an ad on the side, it's a logo. It's this junk and so I get discouraged, I want to pin the story, but the picture that would be pin with it is so ugly that it'll make me look clueless on Pinterest, so I don't pin it. So you have to test with Pinterest. Make sure your blog posts will look good when pinned, that's number three. Number four, reduce the speed bumps to sharing your blog post. This means add all the share buttons. At the bottom of the blog posts, put that thing up that says, click here to tweet, click here for Facebook, click here for LinkedIn. Click here to pin. You can add these buttons individually from each service, or there's also services where they provide the whole block at once. Make it easy to share your blog post. Tip number five, sort of follow on to tip number four, there's this great service called Click to Tweet. So you add Click to Tweet. And when you put this in your blog post, when people click on it, it'll open up their Twitter account, and you'll already have a pre-done tweet. So this makes it so easy for people to tweet a particular blog post or a particular part of a blog post. First when I heard this, I said, well, if people are going to tweet, they're going to tweet and not, not but I'm telling you that if you put Click to Tweets in there, it encourages sharing your blog posts, So Click to Tweet, check out Click to Tweet. Number six is to encourage social login. Social login is the concept that people can log in to leave comments. This is kind of a win-win. It's good for the consumer, the reader, because it's just one less account to maintain, it's one less thing to register. It's good because it provides you better analytics. You should give people the option to use social login for commenting and for your blog and website. Number seven, leverage LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a beautiful thing, the most serious social media platform. So what you want to do is create, as opposed to curate, create 500 to 1,000 word essays, post them on LinkedIn. This is, in a sense, a different form of blogging. What I do is I take the same story that I post on my blog, and I post it in LinkedIn as if it were a separate blog. Two different markets, two different set of readers, much more exposure. You could take your blog post and try to curate it into LinkedIn. So you tell people on LinkedIn to go to your blog post. I think that LinkedIn is such a serious site, such a destination in and of itself, that you should just post the same thing twice. There's a LinkedIn audience that will read your post, there's a blog audience that will read your post, identical post, two plus two will equal five or six. Number eight, if I had a choice between having a follower or someone's email address, I would pick someone's email address all day long. Because if I have a follower, it's not clear that that follower is awake or watching the social media platform at the time that I post. Email has much higher probability that the person will get the email, click through and read a blog post. So don't give up on email. An email is a beautiful thing. Don't forget email, very powerful tool. Number nine, is to write guest posts and ask other blogs to use it. Other blogs have different followers, they have different readers, they have different fan base. So don't just blog on your blog, also write things and give it to other bloggers who share your interests, your passions, who might reach a different part of the kind of people who are interested in the same thing. So for me, I would write a blog post about entrepreneurship. But then I would get some other blogger who also writes about startups and entrepreneurship and venture capital to take a guest post for me. It's good for that person, because that person has some free content. And it's good for me because I reach a new audience. And number 10 is to take your best blog posts and create a SlideShare out of it. This means that you take the most important point, I'm not saying that you should take 1,000 words and stick it into PowerPoint. Take the most important point, take the bullet item, if you will, and make it into SlideShare. SlideShare reaches an entirely different market. So blog posts for your blog readers, SlideShare with a summary of your blog post reaches a different market. You can even link the two because some people would rather read text, other people would rather click through SlideShare. It's another way of getting two plus two to equal five. Those are the top 10 tips about integrating social media and blogging.