These days you need more than just a web site to help promote your business. Most people probably don’t need much help with social networking but there are so many tools out there to help promote your web site and business that it’s easy to get confused between your tweets and your pokes.
The key to getting your web site noticed is to gain good results in the search engines, the key to that is creating good content. Google doesn’t like it when you copy and paste content from other web sites and you aren’t going to be found on the search engines if you haven’t updated your site in months. A great way to write new content is a blog (often re-branded as a news page). Although you can write about anything, if you want your blog to work for your business you need to write relevant content, Google loves this, so if you are for example a photographer writing about a new project or a new set of photos on your web site this will help to keep your web site up to date and you’ll get the all important thumbs up from Google.
WordPress is a superb blogging platform, if you have a WordPress web site there are a multitude of plugins out there that can help link your site to social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, YouTube and many more.
Here are a few of my favorite social networking tools and plugins.
Simple Twitter Connect
Simple Twitter Connect is a series of plugins that let you add any sort of Twitter functionality you like to a WordPress blog. This lets you have an integrated site without a lot of coding, and still letting you customize it exactly the way you’d like.
Simple Facebook Connect
Offers the exact same functionality as Simple Twitter Connect. Allows for easy integration to a WordPress blog. Users can connect directly to Facebook through your web site and can leave comments on articles in the same way a WordPress user can. You can also add the famous Like button to your posts and pages or even a live Facebook feed. This is the ultimate plugin if you want close integration between your web site and Facebook page.
Twitterfeed
If you don’t want all the features of Simple Twitter/Facebook Connect you can set up your RSS feed to automatically send any new posts directly to Twitter or Facebook. Twitterfeed is a stand alone web site that makes the process simple.
