When you’ve set yourself up on any new social media site, one easy way to maximize your personal benefit from your presence is to have any new postings, status updates, or tweets automatically feed to your website(s) and/or your blog(s).
What this means, briefly, is that your Facebook updates, for example, can also appear on your blog page and on your web site.
Don’t worry about “how” to do this – usually you can find that information pretty easily by Googling the topic or within the Help or FAQ sections of your blog or the social media site. Generally what you’re going to do is either figure out (or have someone else do it for you) how to set up an RSS feed directly to your web site or blog. There may also be a “widget” you can put on your blog or website – usually in a column on the left or right, sometimes on the bottom of the page, or perhaps within a designated box on the page. A “widget” is a short piece of computer code written in HTML, the computer language the Internet understands. The good news is you don’t have to understand the HTML code in the widget, all you have to do is copy and paste it to the proper location – once you figure out how that is. If you’re at all computer savvy and especially if you have the least comfort with HTML, you’ll find this process delightfully easy – if it leaves you pulling on your earlobe, ask a savvy friend or a company IT person for assistance.
There are several reasons to post your own social media feeds on your blog or website:
- Your work, meaning anything you write, will show up in multiple places, increasing the possibility of it’s being seen and read and accomplishing its purpose.
- Very few people, if anyone, will follow everything you write or post on every social media site, web site, or blog – if the information appears in multiple places, your message’s impact has a better chance.
- While it’s not a good idea to have the same data on every type of site on the Internet (web site, blog, social media, and social networks) – by feeding the social media posts to your web site and blog the content appears and actually is richer.
- Your readers' or your market’s perception of you being more “connected” and seen will increase.
- You can point to your blog or web site – occasionally, do not overdo it – from social media sites, and once someone goes to your blog or web site they will have a chance to see what else you do, say, or have.
The overall purpose of cross-feeding social media content to your blog and web site is that it’s a convenient way to heighten your Internet presence and impact – which is the over-riding reason for all this in the first place.
