With the emergence of technology and the Internet has come multiple tools one can use to engage conversation of like minded people. These tools can really help generate communication over multiple boundaries than were ever possible before, like how quickly social media impacted the spread of news and relief efforts for the Tsunami in Japan. As a student in social media, I have been lucky enough to learn about more ways to engage in public conversation than I know what do to with. However, as an active socialite and young professional with a big network of friends still in college, I find the best way to communicate with my peers is through facebook.
Now, one of the main reasons I find facebook is the most useful tool is because everyone has one. Twitter is up in coming, and many people dont follow it or have an account yet that I am friends with, but you can just as easily as tweeting put your status up on facebook which actually drives more people to your page. The advantage of this is that they can learn more about you than just what you are doing at that time. They can see pictures of what you have been up to lately, see in your info what you do (careers, school interests), and see who you have been talking to on your wall. Facebook is the only site that really integrates all the information a person would want to know about you so they can get the big picture of who you are and what your up to.
One way I have used facebook to drive traffic to my blog is to link my blog to a friends page if I mention them in the post or mention a topic they would be interested in in my blog. This way, I am reaching out to them and their network to gain viewership. I also link to my own facebook page to get my network of people interested. That said, there are other ways people are successful at driving traffic to their blog. One of the bloggers in our class, Kelly Carnes, drives traffic to her blog really well by using twitter and writing about relevant current topics so that more people will see her tags and find her blog in Google searches. Her social network on twitter is quite big and includes a lot of people in the natural history network what are interested in what she has to say as a Smithsonian employee.
In order to better generate blog viewership, I want to use facebook and twitter in combination. In the coming weeks I will try to make my posts relevant to topics of interest amongst my friends so that I can generate a solid following.
Chameleon 