Last week, I began a series of posts about making your social media presence manageable, with a series of tips to help you make blogging a more manageable process. Now that we’ve written content, though, and are trying to build an audience, how do we keep them connected and let them know when we’ve got new material for them to read (or listen to or view, if you’re podcasting)?
If our blog is the core of our social media presence, then RSS is the technology that glues it to other services. RSS is typically recognized as an acronym for “Really Simple Syndication,” though I prefer to think of it as “Ready for Some Stories”. Simply put, RSS makes it easy for a reader to keep up-to-date when new content is posted to a blog, newspaper, or other site providing an RSS feed. Instead of you going to each site to see if it’s got something new to read, new content comes to you. We thus provide an RSS feed of our content, so people using a tool like Google Reader, NetNewsWire, or NewsGator can access our news stream anytime.
However, RSS adoption rates vary. Depending on whom your blog’s audience is, you may find that very few of your readers use an RSS reader (or even understand what RSS is). It’s important to make your information available to people via a variety of channels, as opposed to forcing them to adopt specific technologies to access and use your content.
Let’s start with e-mail. We provide a daily e-mail version of the previous day’s blog posts. It’s opt-in, and people can unsubscribe at any time. We use a free service from Google called FeedBurner to handle this. Essentially, FeedBurner listens to our blog’s RSS feed and collects information for each daily e-mail. No new blog posts for the day? Then no e-mail is sent. FeedBurner takes a few minutes to set up, but it’s worth the effort.
Our daily e-mail goes out around 7:30 central time each morning, so we schedule each day’s designated new content to publish around 6:45. This makes sure the new content we want to feature shows up at the top of the e-mail message.
Next up is other social networks. Facebook and Twitter currently rule the roost in terms of overall user bases. We have a Twitter account and Facebook page for users of those services to be notified of new content from us. I’ll talk more in-depth about what we do with Twitter and Facebook in a future post, but the key takeaway here is that the links you see on either to new content on our blog are all posted automatically through a great, free service called TwitterFeed. Create a TwitterFeed account, then point it to an RSS feed you wish to share. You can then schedule new items from that feed to post to Twitter, Facebook, and a few other social networking services automatically.
We’re thus able to spread the word about new blog content in four ways: Through an RSS reader, through a daily e-mail message, through Facebook, and through Twitter. As a blog author, I’ve only had to spend real time focusing on my content and not on distribution. For us as a group, this makes our social media presence manageable and allows us to reach readers using the delivery mechanisms of their preferences.
Next week I’ll dig deeper into how we use Twitter to not only share links to our own content, but share cool work and ideas done by others we meet online.
