The following is a list of the most common social media features added to the sites we build. Since we use open source platforms most apps can be added easily for a minimal cost.
Threaded Comments – Comments allow your readers to interact with you and add more insight into your post. You can reply to the comments and participants will receive email notifications. Your blog can be set to have the comments go live or for you to moderate it.
Bookmarking Icons (Share) These are the small icons you see at the end of articles or blog posts. You or your visitors can share your content by posting a summary and the link of your post to other social media sites such as Facebook, Reddit, Digg and del.icio.us.
Send to a Friend – You can add a button that when clicked upon will open up a new window for you to enter in friends name, email and a message. An email will be sent to your friend providing them with a link to the page, article or blog post that you receommend. Options exist to add in multiple friends and copy yourself.
Follow Us or Join Us Icons – There are a variety of icons available to help your visitors connect with you in their own way. The most common are “Join us on Facebook,” “Become a Fan,” “Follow Us on Twitter,” & “Tweet with Us.” Others sites common to connect with are LinkedIn (for B2B contacts), Flickr (if you have photos or images) and your You Tube Channel (if your content is video). Musicians often use MySpace.
Blog Post Feeds – You can now have your blog posts show up automatically on your homepage, other sites you own or even certain social media sites such as facebook. Retweeting Applications – Retweeting applications allow your reader to retweet your twitter post easily. The reader clicks on “retweet this” and it opens up twitter providing the RT @yourname and title.
Twitter Feeds – You can now put your twitter feed on your site or Facebook wall. Commonly you will see feeds on side columns or at the bottom of a website with follow us icons placed nearby. These show the most recent tweets along with the time. There are many variations and the look can be customized.
RSS Feeds – Real Simple Syndication. Rather than receive an email, your readers can subscribe to have recent posts show up in their chosen reader such outlook or Google Reader. This icon is the small orange one you see often with the word FEED beside it.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – The addition of this module allows you to easily put relevant keywords in the Titles, Meta Tags, and URLs of every page. You can also add in a description. This would be the description that shows in search results.
Organizational Tools – Posts can be grouped by tags, categories and date. Tools allow you to organize your posts and have them listed under categories. A tagcloud shows in a visual form the number of posts in a category by making that font larger.
Tracking – Most of our clients set up Google Analytics to track the traffic on their blog. Other Statistics & Metric Tools are available as well (see below in the list of blog tools).
More and More Blogging Tools… – Yes there are many and everyday something new becomes available – editing, news aggregators, newsletter subscription etc… The best thing to do is think what feature you would like on your site. You can ask us or do a search. Some beta version is most likely close to ready. Alternately customization may not be too difficult.
Happy Blogging!
