Blogs pave the path to share and to express your ideas. Blog needs a  fuel called readership. Social media helps you to increase readership and hence adding a social dimension becomes an important aspect of blogging. People love to share useful information. Your fresh short posts should have ways to share and express. Comments in your blog is one part of it, presence in sharing platforms like facebook, twitter, Yahoo buzz, digg, delicious, stumble upon helps to attract external readers. This is also termed as organic readership growth. Power of social media is well know. One classic example is the story of Time Warner cable and it’s increased use of tweets as main medium to solve customer issues, and information exchange.

How to add social dimension to Blog?

Comments etiquette – Comments are compulsory in blog posts. Allow readers to express their opinion. Respect freedom of expression, anchor to any blog.

Twitter - Having a twitter account against your domain name or blog motto is  must. Create auto tweets using plugins. A tweet in url, if useful will get re tweeted by others and sharing will provide exponential traffic to your blogs. Read more about how to get engaged in twitter. Plugins you must have in your blog.

Social Bookmarking – Bookmarking websites helps you to create incoming links, and link sharing. Most of the bookmarking websites allow you to give abstract of your actual content. Some the famous plug-ins for social bookmarking sites are Sociable (WordPress) helps you to share contents in close to 199 social bookmarking sites.

Web profiles – Let your web profiles have link to your blogs and blogs to your social profile. Blogs are not just  a way to create a posts, It is a way to “LET THE WORLD KNOW WHO YOU ARE“

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WordPress popular, simple and no doubt the best weblog platform, has many plug-ins for better twittering. Plugins are add-ons to your blogging applications they let you customize the look and feel of your Blog. Plugins can extend wordpress to do almost everything you imagine. The simplicity of installation with WordPress 2.7 versions has increased more plugin usage. Over 42oo plugins are released to wordpress users. Few advices to choose valid plugins are,

1. Keep track of how many people have downloaded it.
2. Read the comments given by users
3. Consider the rating of the plugin to identify the user friendliness and usage
4. Read the authors comments

 As a blogger you wanted to do few things, firstly you wanted to update to your social networking group that “you have written a blog on xyz and this is a link”  i.e update whenever a new post is created in your blog. Secondly,  you want your readers to update in their tweets about what you have written i.e Visitors should be allowed to tweet about your post. Thirdly, Update your visitors with your latest tweets. finally, you wanted your user comments to be updated in your twitter page. To accomplish all this you need few twitter plug-ins.

Tweet me -  Automatic tweet whenever you publish a post

Tweet this – Links every posts in your blog, Users can tweet about your post and link through this

Add Twitter RSS -  Adds twitter rss to the Header of your blog

Tweet stats – Recently tweeted posts widget  to your site.

Twitter digest – A daily post containing tweets from twitter account

Twitter Friends widget – displays twitter friends in your sidebar in the same way as your twitter home page

Twitter plugins are not limited to the above list. Many more plugins can be tested and used for better twitter and wordpress integration.

HAPPY TWEETING! & HAPPY BLOGGING!

Understand the importance of social media in blogging,

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