How can you help your customers and prospects find all your blog posts and other Social Media content?  There are now well over 100 Million blogs, over 700 thousand News sites and over 50 online PR agencies.  How on earth can you get your content noticed?

The answer is you need to know about using the right tools to make sure you get found.  Social Media by definition is all about people getting ‘social’ and interactive with each other.  There are many helpful tools to help you find the most interesting content to you and those tools can also help your targets find your content.  Tools such as blog search alerts, news readers and RSS integration will help you and others find all types of information and opinions, reviews etc. about many companies and their products and services.  These tools can also help you to track what is being said about your company, your competitors and your marketplace generally.

So let’s take a look at each of these tools in more detail:

Blog Search Alerts

The simplest and by far the easiest way to find the content you are looking for is to do a search on Google Blog Search or any other blog directory such as Technorati.  These tools will also allow you to bookmark any interesting blogs that you might want to re-visit at a later date.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a very useful free tool which allows you to set up alerts for any topic or phrases that you want to know about.  Google Alerts will automatically send you and email each time a word or phrase has a new entry on the internet – for example we have set up a Google Alert for WSI IMS so that we will know immediately anything new is written about us on the web.  We have similarly set up Google Alerts for many of our clients who want to know what is being said about them on the internet.  You can also set up alerts for your keywords and your competitors so you can keep up to date with what they are doing.

Setting up a Google Alert is very straightforward, simply type in the name or phrase you want to be advised about, press the ‘Add Alert’ button and you are done.  You can even choose whether you want to receive an email immediately something is published or have a daily summary sent to you instead.

News Readers and RSS aggregation

The most popular way to stay informed about updates to your favoured blogs is through RSS (really simple syndication) feeds.  The RSS protocol is now a universal format which means all RSS readers are able to display any / all RSS feeds.

RSS feed can be used to display a summary of the latest blog articles you have posted. Most Blogs now include RSS feeds which give you the option to subscribe to the blog which will notify you when the blog has been updated, either with a new post or a new comment.

If you would like more information about Business Blogging, please leave a message below or visit WSI IMS – WSI Internet Marketing Services in Surrey, Sussex, Kent & throughout the South East of England.