Posted: Saturday, 2 March 2013 by Hacking Simplified in Labels:
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Tools for Linking Blogger and Social Network sites
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Previously I've described the approaches for linking your blog and the social networks. This article is about specific tools that can be used for each approach.




"Follow-me"


Inviting readers to connect your account to theirs on ...
  • LinkedIn:  There must be a way - not found it yet.


"Look at This"


Giving readers a tool to talk about or recommend your blog-post in their account in:
  • Email-this-post:
    Turn this on using Design > Page Elements > Blog Posts - tick the Show Email Post Links button.  You have some options deciding where in the post it goes.  

A Word about Third Party Tools:

Until recently, a common approach has been to use a 3rd party tool, e.g AddThis.

But there have been some less than well-behaved tools which are effectively hackerware (eg the TweetMe widget) - so it's been hard to work out what to trust.

Personally, I almost jumped out of my skin the day I first used an AddThis button on a newspaper site to put a link to an article about me onto my Google blog:  half-an-hour later I suddenly realised that I'd just given my main google account password to a 3rd party that I knew nothing about.  I couldn't get to a computer to change it fast enough!.

I don't recommend installing any tool that asks a reader to enter their password for a social networking site anywhere except on that social networking site.


"Look-what-I-wrote"


 Showing content from your blog on ...
  • Facebook:  Automatically updating Facebook every time you publish your Blog (coming soon)
  • LinkedIn  Automatically updating LinkedIn every time you publish your Blog (coming soon)


"Look what I said over there"


This options is about updating your blog with content from your social media site(s), and has a few possible approaches.

1 Use an RSS feed:


Burn (or just get the address of) a feed from your Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn etc account, than then:
  • Display it in an RSS Gadget in your blog, or
  • Use a service like feed2js.org to convert the feed into Javascript, and put the resulting Javascript into the post.

2 For Facebook, use a page badge:

Make a badge for your Facebook Page choosing to show the stream but hide the Faces and Header - this will show what was posted in the Page on your blog.    It's especially useful if you can put it in a place (eg a post or page) where the badge can be quite wide.


3 Manual update:

This won't be a popular approach.

But personally I've found that different networking tools respond best to different messages, so generally I try to do cross-platform promotion (ie from Blogs to Social Networks ad back again) in a way that customises the message for the platform - and manual is the only realistic way to do this at the moment.
 

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