How to use Social Networks to update your sites?

Having an online presence is like having bookshelves. You do not want to mix your personal journal with your business newspapers, neither your family photo albums with your company brochures. So how do you tidy everything up?

Firstly you need to have clearly in your mind what is personal and what is for business purposes. This can be hard depending on your profession but that should the easiest part . After all you alone know what your are trying to achieve. This will determine what message you would like to spread and to whom.

Once this is clear, the best approach is to merge your efforts by focusing on crucial websites which will feed others. You probably know that some people visit your website, some people have a look at your Facebook pages, follow you on Twitter, or comment on your blog etc. Your visitors have so many ways to get in touch with you that the challenge for you is to get your message out there, to all of them, at the same time and with a minimum effort.


So how do you do that?

Social Networks, RSS feed and embedding are the keys. Let me explain to you with concrete examples and tools how to tidy up your online social life. Those tips can be applied to your website if you have basic knowledge in HTML, otherwise you can also use most of those quick steps for your blog.

So where do you start?

Twitter: If you do not already have an account with Twitter, I will encourage you to do it. I was myself a bit sceptical about it, thinking how can I have possibly the time to tell others about small details which you think nobody will care, but I was wrong.

Twitter can also be used to feed content to your website or blog thanks to badges, which you can get directly from them. Badges is a piece of code that you can copy and embed on your site, which allows you to display in real time your latest tweets.

Those little message of 151 characters can be very useful to send updates to your followers, whether it is promotional message, status update, day to day thoughts, possibilities are unlimited. This little badge will act your “What’s on” board, which you can display on your homepage, or news page.

Flickr: 'A picture is worth a thousand words', so why not have 200 for free? 200 pictures is what you can upload and share from the Free Flickr Account. You can upgrade anytime later on to their “pro” account which gives you unlimited upload.

So how can we use Flickr for our website? Well, this Yahoo! service, will be your images library, you can organise them, name them, even Geo-tag them so you could later on display a world map of where your pictures have been taken thanks to Trippermap.

Once you’ve organised your pictures, you can find on the web an arsenal of tools to display your galleries. One of my favourite is http://www.tinou.com/coverflow.jsp which give you chance to have a nice iTunes style gallery. Another good one, ready to embed is http://flickrslidr.com.