For small business owners; its enough of a struggle to post new content regularly to your blog. Let alone worrying about Facebook, Twitter, and all the other new social media sites that pop up regularly.
Your Content Plan
This is why it is so important to have a content plan for your blog. (You do have a blog for your business, right!?) A content plan can be as simple as just knowing what your next ten articles are going to be, and putting them on a calendar so you know when they will be published.
Once you have a content plan for your blog, you can use the same content to create updates for your Facebook Page and Twitter.
Syndicating Your Blog Posts using RSS
Most blogs have the ability to "syndicate" content built-in, using a technology called RSS.
RSS stands for really simple syndication, and this capability creates a stream of content that other sites can subscribe to and get updates every time you create a new blog post.
The magic of this RSS feed is this: you can set it up to automatically update your Facebook and Twitter accounts whenever you post something new to your blog! A myriad of tools exist to help you with this, including Feedburner Socialize and Ping.fm.
Establishing Your Social Media Presence
Once you've set up these three very important elements for your business - Blog, Facebook Page, Twitter account, you have a basic Social Media presence that you can build on. Establishing a basic content strategy and automatically updating these sites from your blog gives you a great start in building a web presence that can get the attention of potential customers.
Once you've tested the waters, you can then start doing more with Facebook and Twitter, by engaging more with your followers and friends there.
So what are you waiting for? Take advantage of your blog's built-in RSS capability and leverage your hard work across not only your blog, but Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites!
I have tried Ping.fm to update to my Facebook account but it keeps on failing. Sometimes it will post, sometimes not. Why is this? I am looking for an alternative. Is Feedburner able to accomplish things like what Ping.fm does? Please recommend on a how to. Thanks!
@Sms – I’m not sure why Ping.fm is only working sometimes for you, but here are a couple more tools that to a good job of delivering your blog’s RSS feed to your Facebook page:
Dlvr.it and Networked Blog.
I am absolutely agree with you. It is very powerful because the RSS gives you opportunities for socializing the blog and it is very easy to do.
Regards
I’m also having trouble posting my rss feed to FB. Sometimes it works butmost of the time I have to do it manually. Thanks Don, I will try out your links.
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I totally agree with your post. My business has actually become less “local” with the reach of my blog and Social Media. I have also found that commenting on other blogs with links back to my posts to be a helpful traffic generator. Thank you Don!