ResearchGoddess

Want a couple of simple tips to make your blog posts more social? I’ve been messing around with a couple of aggregation tools and I’ve discovered two quick ways to get your content in front of more eyeballs in the process. These techniques are simple and will help you to become more findable through some social channels – Twitter in particular.

Tip 1: Use hashtags in the title of your blog. Sounds like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? But think about this: when your post is being shared on Twitter, it will help to make your post more findable by associating it with an established hashtag. For example: in the recent post I wrote recapping my experience at the Social Recruiting Summit, instead of spelling it out, I used the #socialrecruiting hashtag that had been set by the conference organizers. That way, when people re-tweet the blog post, the hashtag is already built in:

Tip 2: Use your Twitter username somewhere in your blog author credentials. This is a little more complicated, but doing this will automatically attribute your blog posts when aggregators that acknowledge post authors pick up your feed. For example: Yahoo Pipes is an incredibly robust resource where you can combine multiple blog feeds into one giant RSS feed and customize a lot of other cool stuff as well. People who know how to use Pipes will often pull information directly from the RSS code to customize their new feeds. One of the code elements is called dc:creator (or occasionally author) and this data is pulled from the information you provide your blogging software with as to how you want to be attributed. Here’s an example of my blog author information:

I use WordPress. Notice in the Nickname section, I’ve added my Twitter username, @researchgoddess. I’ve selected my Nickname to use as my display name. This way, when anyone pulls information from my blog’s dc:creator element, they’re automatically grabbing my Twitter name as well. Here’s what it looks like directly on the post:

Note: if you are using Feedburner, it will override your dc:creator field with whatever you have as your First Name in your account settings. To apply this tip when using Feedburner, just click on My Account and change the information in the First Name field, adding your Twitter username. Here’s what the result looks like when using Yahoo Pipes:

What this will help with is getting proper attribution for you when you publish blog posts. I don’t have any stats or percentages for how many more clicks, views, etc. this might produce yet, but hey – it can’t hurt to try these techniques out. Hope these simple tips help!

Tags: socialrecruiting

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