Award-winning web development since 1995
Written: October 27, 2012
There are so many ways that a client or prospect will discover your business, become aware, get interested, then finally decided to take action and phone or email you. If you communicate with a web site, blog and Facebook, then consider integrating all three to maximize your marketing impact.
Let’s take a look at what Nancy Emerson did with her surfing business. Her web site is www.surfclinics.com and at the top we added icons and links to both Twitter and Facebook:
Next, we actually embed a Facebook badge on the Home page, so that web visitors can see what’s being shared on Facebook:
Finally, on the Home page we embed her top four blog Posts:
We built Nancy’s web site with WordPress which has excellent support for blogging, so there’s a menu called Blog where you can read the most recent blog posts or search for words in any blog.
In Facebook you can install a free app that will automatically publish your Blog post on your Facebook page, this allows you two write the blog once then have it appear both on your web site and on Facebook. There are many Facebook apps that do this: RSS Graffiti, Social RSS.
You can even have your blog posts automatically Tweet using a free site called TwitterFeed.
I do the same thing on my web site, where I can write one blog post then have it show up on my:
The more ways that a client or prospect can read about your business, the better it is for your business.
Tags: blog, Facebook, RSS, Twitter, WordPress
I finally broke down and created a Twitter account for my web business here at Tualatin Web. Follow me at @tualatinweb
I blogged earlier about how I found this cool PHP class to read my tweets and post them on a marketing blog page. The tweets were just unformatted and didn’t have any links in them so I set about to upgrade the formatting to add links to:
Here’s what I did in PHP using the preg_replace function:
foreach($data as $tweet) {
// Replace # with link to search.twitter.com, replace @ with link to twitter account
$link = preg_replace(“_http://[a-zA-Z0-9\./]+_”,”<a href=’$0′>$0</a>”,$tweet->text);
$replace_pound = preg_replace(“/#[a-zA-Z0-9]+/”,”<a href=’http://search.twitter.com/search?q=$0′>$0</a>”,$link);
$html_pound = preg_replace(“/q=#/”,”q=%23″,$replace_pound);
$replace_at = preg_replace(“/@[a-zA-Z0-9_]+/”,”<a href=’http://twitter.com/$0′>$0</a>”,$html_pound);
$html_at = preg_replace(“_twitter.com/@_”,”twitter.com/”,$replace_at);
print “<li>$html_at</li>
“;
}
Here’s what the linked tweet feed now looks like:
I’m using Twitter for three different accounts: Portrait Photography, PMPA, Marketing EDA. My challenge was how to keep up with all those tweets from my followers, and tweeting of my own.
Twitterfox to the rescue. This ingenious Firefox browser plug-in is simple to install and use. Shown above is the pop-up window that appears when you click the little Twitter icon in the lower right-hand corner of your Firefox browser.
To swap Twitter accounts I just click on my account name and choose from a list. Simple, effective, free, all of the things that I love.
At my marketing web site www.marketingeda.com I wanted to add a Twitter feed using PHP and found something at twitter.slawcup.com/twitter.class.phps that does just that.
The PHP coding is very simple to use with this class:
include_once(‘classes/class.twitter.php’);
$t = new twitter;
$t->username = ‘marketingeda’;
$t->password = ‘********’;
$data = $t->userTimeline();
foreach($data as $tweet) {
print “<li>$tweet->text</li>
“;
}
Here’s the output result of this PHP script:
I’ll be presenting to the Portland Metropolitan Photographer’s Association on Thursday, July 9th starting at 7PM. More details here.
Maybe you’ve got accounts at several social media sites, like: Plaxo, LinkedIn, Blogger, Facebook, Twitter.
Wouldn’t it be easier to post once and have all these sites updated?
If that’s appealing then browse over to ping.fm and check out their free service that does just that for you. I have no idea what their business model is and I suspect that they won’t be in business in two years, but hey, it works and it’s free. Two of my favorite things on the web.
Update
Since I first wrote this blog ping.fm has been bought by seesmic, then bought by hootsuite.
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I love your blog.. very nice colors & theme. Did you create this website yourself or did you hire someone to do it for you? Plz reply as I’m looking to create my own blog and would like to find out where u got this from. appreciate it
I created this custom theme from scratch. My business is to develop custom themes, plugins and features for web sites, both WordPress and custom.