Orthodox Biz Blog

I get a lot of questions about using Facebook and Twitter for promoting businesses and ministries. In this brief blog, I'm going to sum up some of the advice I often give clients on how to leverage the Social Media trend.

Social Media are sites like Facebook and Twitter where people share information and interact with each other. On sites like this, people talk to each other via instant messaging and interact using posts, rather than passively consuming content that has been prepared for them. The trick is to get them talking and interacting about you.

Here are some easy step-by-step techniques for plugging into that space.

1) Start a Facebook Fan Page - If you have multiple product lines with some differentiation, you might even start more than one. An example is the Orthodox Christian Network. There is a Facebook Fan page for the OCN in general, but there are also Facbook Fan pages for each of the radio stations that the OCN provides (The Ark , The Rudder , and The Anchor ). Why? Because each style of radio has a unique fan base. The OCN is a catch-all, but the individual fan pages allow people with shared tastes to congregate together online.

It is also an awesome way to get feedback on individual product lines. People are more willing to pop a quick post out on Facebook than they are to leave a Website comment or to use the Contact Us form. So authors might consider fan pages for different books, pastors different fan pages for different ministries, etc.

2) Set up a Twitter account.

3) Publicize your Facebook and Twitter pages in a prominent location on your site. At the top seems to work best, as you can see on BantheCams.org

4) Decide which way you want to publish. If you have a Joomla, Drupal, or Wordpress site, then your Website generates an RSS feed. You can use that RSS feed to automatically publish your Website content on your Facebook Fan page and on your Twitter page. We like to use a Facebook application called RSS Graffiti for this. You can find it here. There are others, but this is the best one we have found so far.

You don't have to use your site's RSS feeds to automatically pull content over to Facebook. You can post content manually to Facebook by doing Wall Posts. For sites that publish a lot of content, though, having it automated is really a big time saver. A site like OCN publishes content everyday and has a lot of different authors. It is much easier to just have the authors submit their content to the site, and then have it automatically flow out to the Facebook Walls of all the fans.

For Twitter, you can use an application called TwitterFeed. That also takes in an RSS Feed and publishes the first 140 characters to your Twitter account, with links back.

But, you may not want to go that direction. You may want to update your Twitter account and have that populate your Website. You can do that with most Content Management Systems (Joomla is our favorite). There are widgets/modules out there that will take your Tweets and publish them to your Website. If you prefer Facebook, then my suggestion is to pull in the RSS feed from the fan page and publish it to the site, or use one of the Facebook tools like a fanbox.

Some Website owners never get the hang of publishing in Joomla (for example) but easily can update Facebook or Twitter. So if you fall into that category, learn to post to Facebook or Twitter, and have the updates posted to your site from there.

5) Put a good book marking tool on your site. We like the Tell a Friend module for Joomla, but there are quite a few out there. The trick is to make sure it is extremely easy for your visitors to share your content on Facebook, Digg, Twitter, etc. The easier it is to share the content, the greater the chance that is what people will do!

Ask any questions you may have below, because there is a lot more to talk about. But, these few steps will at least get you started.

Glen Chancy is the CIO of CorFun , a eServices Company, publisher of Orthodox Biz, and a recognized expert on the Joomla Content Management System. Contact him here.