Page 1 Solutions Blog

Website Marketing | Web Design | SEO

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Using Social Media to Promote Web Writing

Writers are not generally famed for their sociability. Sometimes this reputation is justified. William Faulkner walked around his home town and generally ignored all the citizens, seeing instead a fictitious town populated by characters of his own creation. But in many cases it is not. And when it comes to web writing, no writer is an island. Links are the key component of hypertext, and the quality of a hypertext improves as its links become more comprehensive and far-ranging. This is also one component influencing the page rank and search results produced by Google and other search engines.

One way to generate additional links, and, potentially, web traffic, is to utilize social media sites. Jonathan Fashbaugh talked about this his post on the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) for businesses. We have also talked about the significance of social media sites on our SEO 101 blog. Page 1 Solutions is about more than talking about this developing trend in SEO. We're out there, and everyone, from the account managers to the writers is getting in the act, albeit some more slowly than others.

As a starting place, all of the employees at Page 1 Solutions are being asked to maintain accounts on several major social media sites. Here are the ones we're beginning with, along with my profile for each:

· Google Profiles: Matthew Candelaria

· LinkedIn: Matthew Candelaria

· Naymz: Matthew Candelaria

· Facebook: Matthew Candelaria

· Xing: Matthew Candelaria

· Plaxo: Matthew Candelaria

· Fastpitch: Matthew Candelaria

Of all these, Fastpitch is, I think, the least useful. To be able to have any connections at all requires a premium membership, which few people are going to spring for. Facebook comes in a close second because, although it has the potential of generating huge amounts of traffic, it also has the potential for wasting tons of your employees' time. It takes supreme willpower to avoid getting distracted by different apps on Facebook.

I can't decide whether Naymz or Plaxo is my favorite. Plaxo has great functionality for finding contacts right away. Not only does it allow you to find many of them quickly, it is like a cool game where each possible contact you pick vanishes to be replaced by another one. You want to catch 'em all. But unfortunately I'm only friends with Caterpie, Beedrill, Nidorina, and Krabby.

Naymz, on the other hand, has a very good functionality for showing links. For writers and other web marketers, this is especially handy because that's what this is all about. The way Naymz is set up, it allows me to give a title that links and a description, both of which are displayed on my profile. Currently, my Naymz profile highlights my work on the blogs of Dr. Lefkovits, a New York plastic surgeon and The Centre, P.C., a plastic surgery center in Indiana, and on the website of Greg Stoner, an eminent domain lawyer in Florida, but I will add more soon.

The other writers should soon be filling out their own social media profiles, at which point I'll talk about some of their projects as well.

If you want to ask writing questions of me, you can engage me through any of the sites above, but contact Page 1 Solutions for internet marketing.

Labels: marketing, social media, writing