Chapter 9
Social Media and Your Blog
You cannot have missed the growing buzz around social media over recent years. It seems the television and newspaper media is obsessed with Twitter this and Facebook that. Perhaps this fixation is because the traditional media fear the new media as competition?
At its most general, social media encompasses every sort of social or community site, but each service or tool can be broadly categorized as social bookmarking, social networking, and media sharing.
This chapter shows you how you can use these various social media tools to your advantage.
Determining Which Social Media Sites to Use
Deciding which social media site to use depends largely on your goals and where your audience hangs out. Your most desired outcome determines which tools to use and how you interact with them. Social media services can deliver terrific benefits to you and your blog, and they are especially good for attracting attention and for encouraging engagement from your readers. With attention, you will potentially grow your links and subscribers, and with more engagement, you will deepen networking connections and retain more loyalty.
The confusion arises when trying to make distinctions, because all of these sites are blending features, with all social media sites allowing you to add friends, and most sites encouraging you to share or rate content.
In terms of promotion, the main draws are social bookmarking sites such as Reddit (www.reddit.com), StumbleUpon (www.stumbleupon.com ...
