Previously I've described the approaches for linking your blog and the social networks. This article is about specific tools that can be used for each approach.
"Follow-me"
- Facebook:
Adding a Facebook personal account badge to your blog
Putting a Facebook Page badge into your blog
- Twitter: Put a Following Me on Twitter button into your blog
- LinkedIn: There must be a way - not found it yet.
"Look at This"
Giving readers a tool to talk about or recommend your blog-post in their account in:
- Facebook Put the Post 2 Profile gadget, in your blog, inviting people to share your post
- Twitter Put the Tweet button into your blog, inviting readers to share either your whole blog, or a specific post
- LinkedIn Put a Share this to LinkedIn button onto your blog.
- Google: Put a customised +1 button into your blog
- Email-this-post:
Turn this on using Design > Page Elements > Blog Posts - tick the Show Email Post Links button. You have some options deciding where in the post it goes.
A Word about Third Party Tools:
Untill recently, a common approach has been to use a 3rd party tool, eg AddThis.But there have been some less than well-behaved tools which are effectively hackerware (eg the TweetMe widget) - so it's been hard to work out what to trust.
Personally, I almost jumped out of my skin the day I first used an AddThis button on a newspaper site to put a link to an article about me onto my Google blog: half-an-hour later I suddenly realised that I'd just given my main google account password to a 3rd party that I knew nothing about. I couldn't get to a computer to change it fast enough!.
I don't recommend installing any tool that asks a reader to enter their password for a social networking site anywhere except on that social networking site.
"Look-what-I-wrote"
Showing content from your blog on ...
- Facebook: Automatically updating Facebook every time you publish your Blog (coming soon)
- Twitter: One approach is to use Feedburner's Socialise your Feed option
- LinkedIn Automatically updating LinkedIn every time you publish your Blog (coming soon)
"Look what I said over there"
This options is about updating your blog with content from your social media site(s), and has a few possible approaches.
1 Use an RSS feed:
Burn (or just get the address of) a feed from your Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn etc account, than then:
- Display it in an RSS Gadget in your blog, or
- Use a service like feed2js.org to convert the feed into Javascript, and put the resulting Javascript into the post.
2 For Facebook, use a page badge:
Make a badge for your Facebook Page choosing to show the stream but hide the Faces and Header - this will show what was posted in the Page on your blog. It's especially useful if you can put it in a place (eg a post or page) where the badge can be quite wide.3 Manual update:
This won't be a popular approach.But personally I've found that different networking tools respond best to different messages, so generally I try to do cross-platform promotion (ie from Blogs to Social Networks ad back again) in a way that customises the message for the platform - and manual is the only realistic way to do this at the moment.
Related Articles:
Approaches for linking your blog and the social networks
Using the Post 2 Profile gadget,
Making a Facebook personal account badge
Making a Facebook Page badge
Putting the tweet button into your blog.
