I found this great tool for social media mar­ket­ing. While the social media land­scape is large and wild, there are sites that stand out and are most pop­u­lar and use­ful. In fact, as a web designer/developer, it is face­book that stands out the most. My clients want to announce their sites on face­book and con­nect their list­ing on face­book with their web­site. One of the things I tell my clients is that what will help them rank higher on Google and other search engines is “fresh content.”

What is fresh con­tent? Well, it’s the kind of con­tent that you find on blogs. Obviously the more good con­tent you have the bet­ter. The con­tent that gets posted on blogs is usu­ally fresher, that is newer, than the con­tent that was put on your web­site 6 months ago. Of course, that puts a bur­den on the busi­ness owner or orga­ni­za­tion, to cre­ate some kind of valu­able infor­ma­tion on a blog on some kind of fre­quent basis. You can­not put an adver­tise­ment out there and wait for the calls to come in to you.

Social net­works offer you another way of get­ting noticed. If you have a blog, there are ways to broad­cast, auto­mat­i­cally, what you are post­ing on the blog, to the social net­works. WordPress using plug-ins for this.

A plug-in extends the func­tion­al­ity of the WordPress soft­ware appli­ca­tion. One in par­tic­u­lar, that I’m think­ing of for this post­ing, is called Network Publisher. If you use WordPress for blog­ging, you can go to Plugins from the menu, in the admin area, and select Add New. Then just put into the search box, Network Publisher. This will find the plug-in with that name and allow you to install it but just click­ing on a link/button.

Once installed, it will refer you to a site called LinksAlpha.com There you can get API keys for each of the Social Networks, includ­ing Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. An API key will con­nect a par­tic­u­lar blog with a par­tic­u­lar account on the social net­works. You can have mul­ti­ple blogs and on Twitter, you can have mul­ti­ple accounts. So, you just input that API key into the appro­pri­ate field from your blog’s admin­is­tra­tive area and then when­ever you post some­thing new on your blog it will be broad­cast to the var­i­ous net­works you have setup through LinksAlpha.com

There are more steps involved in this but hope­fully it is clear from what I wrote. For exam­ple, from within LinksAlpha, you must select to have your spec­i­fied blog post to the par­tic­u­lar social net­work. In addi­tion, with regard to face­book, you can even spec­ify that Network Publisher post your blog post­ings on a par­tic­u­lar face­book page, in addi­tion to, or as opposed to post­ing to your profile.

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