Finding Information to Share on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn

If you are just starting to use social media marketing to promote your business (and regardless of whether you have your own blog), you will want sources of information connected to your brand to share with others.



The main concept of social media marketing is sharing information that your followers might be interested in rather than only trying to sell your own products or services.

Sharing information connected to your brand helps establish your expertise, and most people do not produce enough content to share only their own material. Thus it is important to find good content from others to share.



One place to find good content is to choose people to follow on Twitter who tweet information and links that might interest your followers. You can use the search function on Twitter to find these people.

Then when you find one of their tweets valuable for your followers, you can retweet this tweet.

(And if you have set up a selective tweets connection to your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, you can add #fb and #in at the end of the retweet to send it to your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts.)

Another strategy is to find several blogs that you feel consistently have good information to share. And as www.technorati.com is probably the biggest blog directory, start with doing a search there on topics related to your brand.

Identify 5-10 blogs you think will be consistently valuable for providing posts for you to tweet. Most blogs will enable you to get notification of new posts automatically so you'll know when there is new material to share. Sign up for these notifications.

Warning: You want to share the permalink to a specific post and NOT the blog's URL. Why? Imagine you share the blog's URL but refer to a specific post title. By the time some of your followers get around to checking out the link you provided, there are new posts on that blog and the post to which you referred is not easily found.

Thus you always want to share the permalink, which you get by clicking on the title of the post that you want to share. This takes you to the unique page on the Internet where this blog post lives. Then you copy the long link of this post and this is the permalink of the post.

If you want to track how many people click through on your links, set up a shortened URL account at bit.ly or budurl.com and shorten the permalink you want to share before tweeting it or posting it as an update on your Facebook or LinkedIn accounts.



Many blogs make it easy for you to share posts on your social media accounts. For example, if you are signed into your Twitter account when you read a post you want to share and the post has an automatic button to share that post on Twitter, just click on the Twitter button.

Most Twitter connection applications will then show the post title and a shortened form of its permalink in your Twitter update box. You can add your own comment to the tweet if you wish and then click the Tweet button.

(Note that sometimes a blog post has the button Share, which you click on and then get the option to share on Twitter.)

Now you have several sources from which to find good content to share with your followers.

© 2011 Miller Mosaic, LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) is the co-founder of Miller Mosaic Social Media Marketing. Download the company's free report "5 Tips for Staying Top of Mind With Your Prospective Target Markets" at www.millermosaicllc.com/los-angeles-s...