For this to happen, there needs to be a social media strategy in place with clear objectives.

A few things came to mind whilst having this discussion.

- Identify who your customers are.
- Identify where they are hanging out.
- Engage with them – participate.
- Find out how you can help them.
- Give it to them – (help them)
- Repeat and rinse.

Social media can beneficial to your business, it all depends on how you use them.

Let’s Interact

Let’s check out some tools that would brag about your blog as well as interact with others.

To continue with our series on “Essentials tools for a new blog“,  Engaging your blog with community is a good thing.

Your blog is always going to be in a world of its own without communication channels or means of reaching out.

There are several ways to create these channels,
however, in this post I shall focus on four social media ones. Some of which have been applied to this very blog.

Twitter (widget)

Let’s face it, as of the time of me writing this post Twitter is the biggest thing out there.  A social networking service that enables you to send and read messages – also known as tweets.
If don’t already have an account – get involved here
And of course there are several third party Twitter applications that would give you a nice tweeting experience.
You can also decide to incorporate your Twitter conversation on your blog in a form of a widget. On this blog I am using Twitter for WordPress

Benefits:

• Freedom of self expression in 140 characters.
• Ability to build a group of targeted followers.
• Ability to update your followers with new activities on your blog.
• Incorporate your Twitter conversation on your blog

Twitter Feed

With Twitter Feed, you can auto-schedule your blog post to distribute to Twitter.
Meaning your followers on Twitter would instantly know when you have a new post.

Benefits:

• Easy way to notify the Twitter world of your blog postings.
• One-time setup

Tweetmeme Button

The TweetMeme retweet button is designed to encourage visitors to tweet your blog post.
This would actually be my first time using this widget.
I am keen to see the effectiveness of it.

Benefits:

• Re-tweeting a post
• Displays the number of tweets

Share Button

It essentially does what it says.
The Share This or Share/Save button encourages visitors to add your posts to social bookmarking sites.
There are tonnes of share this application around. The Share button used here is by Add to Any.

Which tools do you use?