Tips & Advice
I know it’s not cool but I’m a bit of a sceptic regarding the currently very popular view that all businesses should be using Twitter and that if they’re not they’re somehow missing out.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Twitter is a great tool, if used in the appropiate context. We have several customers who use Twitter and/or have added Twitter feeds to their primary websites (see examples below) and see benefits from this.
However, for each of these there are truckloads of businesses who set up Twitter accounts because of the hype and then either
- don’t use them
- use them for a honeymoon period of a couple of weeks then lose interest, or
- post occasional updates that are completely irrelevant (going to the shop for a sandwich, hooray it’s Friday)
The Chaser team seized on this with glee when they started looking at politicians’ Twitter accounts on ABC TV’s Yes We Canberra leading up to the 2010 Australian federal election, as illlustrated in the short clip below.
When Twitter is useful for business
The organisations that get the most from Twitter are usually …
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RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. Using RSS feeds is a way of keeping track of updates to a frequently updated website or part of a website, showing when new articles or comments have been added.
For example if you regularly read 20 different blogs or sites you could subscribe to RSS feeds from each of these sites and then use a feedreader to easily check a digest of all new articles each day without having to visit all of the sites one by one.
Should I have an RSS feed from my website?
If you have a website and publish regular updates, like news or blog posts, you should offer your visitors the chance to subscribe to your website’s RSS feed.
How do I do this?
If we build you a website using WordPress you’ll automatically have an RSS feed from your site. The address of your feed will be http://www.yourdomainname.com/feed/. If you have different types or categories of content that you regularly update you can also offer people category-specific feeds.
For example the Go4 website’s main RSS feed is here: http://www.go4.com.au/feed/ – this shows alls new posts we add to our site. The RSS feed for our blog is available at …
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Social networking. Facebook. The words on everyone’s lips right now.
Here are two easy ways to use Facebook to help promote your business website that won’t require much extra work for you.
1. Let people to be good sharers
Building in the ability for your visitors to quickly share something they see and like on your site with their network of friends on Facebook (or other social networks) is a simple and effective way to getting your content spreading through those networks.
It works like this
- We set up the ability for people to share your content on your site – this adds some little icons to the bottom of your pages and posts
- A visitor to your site sees a page or post they like on your site, clicks a ‘Share on Facebook’ icon and is taken to their Facebook page where your link and a summary is prepopulated for them . They hit the button and you’re shared across their network. Easy.
2. Publish in two places at the same time
It’s pretty easy to to set up a Facebook page for your business. But how do you integrate this with your existing website without making a …
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