#FF @ginidietrich and my buddy @rustyspeidel (HB2U, Rusty!) I also highly recommend Gini’s blog, Spin Sucks.
If you’re not familiar with “follow Friday” — it is a weekly feature on Twitter where users recommend others to follow, as indicated by the tag #FF.
So you finally got down to it, wrote and published a blog post. Think you’re done? Hardly!
Here are five steps to take to make sure that people actually find and read your blog post:
1. Do a Google blog search on the topic of your post. Find other posts that are similar in nature, read them and, if appropriate, leave a comment.
2. Share the link to your post across your social networks — on Twitter, Facebook and if appropriate, LinkedIn.
3. If your business/company/organization has a Facebook page, post the link to the post (if it is relevant to the business) on the page.
4. Think about who you know who is not an active part of your social network, but who would really appreciate what you’ve just written. You can probably think of a couple of people. Send them the link in an individually addressed e-mail.
5. If you are lucky enough to have generated some comments, respond to them.
My friend Leigh Fazzina just used Twitter as a rescue tool. Leigh took a bad spill from a bike in an unfamiliar area with limited cell reception. Leigh has a strong network of followers on Twitter and when she couldn’t contact emergency services using her phone, she was able to tweet; her followers responded and sent an ambulance to find her. Leigh is recovering with bumps, bruises and muscle soreness.
The story was covered by USA Today where some commenters have missed the point entirely.
What Leigh did was resourceful and because of the relationships she’s initiated, nurtured and maintained, she had a solid, reliable, caring group of people she could contact when she was unable to reach anyone else with any other more conventional method.
I had a similar, though non-emergency experience when our kayak was stolen a couple of weeks ago. After alerting police, I tweeted to my followers (who retweeted) until someone located our stolen property, thus starting the process of prosecuting the thief and recovering our kayak.
Twitter, and the networks it creates and allows one to maintain, is fantastic. If you don’t get it, you’re just missing out. That’s all.
