3 Things I Learned From The Social Media Cheatsheet

by anna on March 8, 2010

in of note


This Social Media Cheat Sheet offers an easy way for people to understand the marketing and branding benefit of various different social media services like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the like. It’s a great overview for people who aren’t used to using social media, particularly business owners who want to learn how they can use social media to promote their businesses. Here are some things I learned from looking it over:

  1. The chief value of Twitter to business owners is to allow them to track what consumers are saying about their brand. Though Twitter can be used to promote a brand, it is tricky and requires somebody who really knows what they are doing. When a brand is promoted well through Twitter, it has a dramatic effect.

  2. Flickr can result in tons and tons of views of your photos, but almost none of it is likely to end up in a click-through to your site, much less convert into repeat visitors or sales leads. It does not tend to increase your traffic.

  3. Reddit is one of the least-friendly social media outlets around unless your brand has something to do with bacon.

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How To Post Your Twitter Follower Numbers To Your Blog In Plain Text (Without A Widget)

by anna on February 17, 2010

in plugins, wordpress

Posting the number of Twitter followers you have is a good way to provide social proof and encourage more people to follow you. We can debate whether this is a winning strategy or not another time (because not all followers are created equal, let’s face it), but today I’m going to show you how you can add a function to your blog that displays your latest Twitter follower count in plain text wherever you want to put it (i.e. without an ugly widget).

First, you need to download the Twounter plugin for WordPress, install it to your blog using FTP, and then activate the plugin through the plugins directory on your WordPress Dashboard it through the plugin directory.

After you’ve activated the plugin, you can paste the following code into your WordPress theme wherever you want the follower count to be displayed:

<?php echo twounter('username') ?>

You need to substitute your own Twitter username into the code where it says “username.” This code can go anywhere in your WordPress theme files that is able to read php code; i.e. it can go into a hook for the Thesis Theme (if you’re using Open Hook), or you can put it into custom_functions.php if you’re going to do a custom layout. One place it cannot go is into a text widget, unless you have downloaded another plugin that allows the text widgets to read php.

In my next post, I’ll show some more pointers on how to style your site so that your follower numbers not only show up, but look cool as well.

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