Puzzle Piece #7: Strategy

Once you have all your profiles set up and some knowledge about each site, you need to broadcast your info to reach a waiting audience. The following are the recommended steps to get the most out of social media.

1. Blatant advertising is not appreciated or respected.
For every article you post that was written by your company, post 10 from another source that are relative to your audience. We recommend Alltop for industry-specific articles people will actually want to read.

2. Use budurl.

It not only shortens long URLs, but it also keeps track of numbers as far as how many people are reading your articles. It will quantify your traffic and show you what is (and isn’t) working.

3. Build relationships on each and every site.
Posting information is not enough. It’s important to converse with people by posting on others’ blogs, writing @replies on Twitter, answering questions on LinkedIn, etc. Engage with others – it will pay off.

4. Blogs: get your posts out to a larger audience.
You can autopost your new blog entry through your statuses using ping.fm. If you use this site, it can also track your numbers via budurl.

Other option: Use pingvine.com. This site enables your blog’s RSS feed to automatically update ping.fm (thus, less work for you). This will still update all your statuses, but it has a downside: You can’t use budURL in conjunction with this site, so you cannot track the number of viewers.
To use: Go to pingvine.com and select ping.fm. Enter your blog’s RSS feed (the same one entered into FeedBurner) and your ping.fm application key (click on “application key” to get yours). Now when you update your blog, it will update all microblogs on ping.fm.