Follow on tips from HBN Social Networking Workshop

The key elements introduced by Richard Wishart (Delivery Management) and myself at the HBN Social Networking Workshop last Friday included Richard Wishart giving a demonstration of using a preprepared blog article involving:

• Preparing a shortlink to the blog using goo.gl
• Broadcasting the shortlink to the blog on LinkedIn and Twitter
• Creating a discussion on in a Group on LinkedIn referring to the blog article

I showed my main routes  for information flow in social media via the illustration above.  They are:

• Incorporating photographs and videos into my blog articles where possible
• I have three different blogs for different interest areas (general, QR Codes, German business)
• The article is then broadcast mainly via Twitter
• Selective articles are passed on to LinkedIn, e-mail newsletters or Facebook

How you use social media to spread the word of interesting content will be your personal choice. Things to avoid are:

• Just advertising yourself
• Saturating the SAME content over ALL your social media

The practical part of the workshop involved:

• Each member of the audience finding Richard's blog, tweet or LinkedIn post
• Liking, retweeting or forwarding the item through their social media

In the discussion following the workshop, the key elements for using Social Networking effectively were:

• Being aware that social networking is tightly linked to you as an individual
• Broadcast selectively to your different interest groups
• Your contacts retweeting or forwarding your news
• Being Social – retweeting or forwarding useful information and conversations from your contacts to others
• Measuring the impact of your social networking.

Following on after the workshop, here are some further tips in brief on linking a blog post with other social media

• Use the blog software to automatically place a new post on a social medium of your choice
• Incorporate like icons and/or social media icons that allow visitors to post your item on their social media with the click of a button
• Link your blog to an automated e-newsletter.

For example, Ann Hawkins uses the plugin Livefyre on blog comments. People who comment are thn notified by e-mail of new comments since theirs, enabling a forum like discussion. Ann is also trialling s2Member to allow people join her group.

I have opt-in mailing systems that will send e-mails of the newest blog posts to subscribers. The blog's URL is collected by an online service called Feedburner. This gives me an RSS feed for the blog which I can link into my mailing system, Aweber.

To follow other peoples blogs at one single location, I use Google Reader.

What solutions can you recommend?