Social media, and tying it all together Monday, 22 November 2010 19:56 Written by Allan Libby

So you have your shiny new website, the layout is all set, all of your modules are working, now you need to spread the word to the masses so that they know about your awesome new slice of the internet.  One inexpensive and effective way to start advertising is to leverage the web 2.0 and social media.  There are a plethora of social networking sites out there, but we are going to focus on telling you how to integrate three of them and an RSS feed.

Up first we have the ultra-popular Facebook.  Facebook used to be the underdog to the incumbent MySpace, this has changed however and Facebook has taken the lead in the social media arena.  Facebook allows you to make a fan page for your blog or company that people can “like” to show their support.  These likes show up on their wall, visible to their friends; which allows your fans to do your marketing for you in a way.

Next on our journey is Twitter, the micro-blogging phenomenon.  Twitter allows you to post messages of up to 140 characters.  There is a myriad of applications for personal computers and mobile devices that allow you to post to Twitter (called tweeting) from anywhere.  This is useful for posting news updates or links to your blog posts for your users to digest quickly.

The new kid on the block is Tumblr, another micro-blogging site, similar to Twitter.  The main difference is you are allowed more characters and are allowed to embed media such as images and movies directly into your posts.  You can also add pages such as an about page or Contact page so your Tumblr can look a lot like a full site.

With all of these different sites you’d think that you will be spending all of your time just updating these sites and not getting any content done for your site.  Not so young padawans, there is a way to get all of these sites updated with just one post.  The key is an intermediate site called twitterfeed, which takes in an RSS feed and publishes it to a number of social media sites.  Tumblr automatically posts to an RSS feed when you create posts on their site, all you need to do is configure twitterfeed to read your Tumblr feed.  Once this is done you sign in with your twitter account and your Facebook account to set twitterfeed to publish to these two services. 

The nice thing with its Facebook integration is you can set it to post do one of the fan pages you administer instead of to your personal wall.  This will also allow you to have an RSS feed directly from Tumblr (I suggest setting up a feedburner account so you can keep track of stats) for yet another way to reach your viewers and fans.