2009 Blog Improvement Project - 6 - Taking My New Social Media For a Test Drive

Kim at Sophisticated Dorkiness nudges us to explore our chosen social media tools for our next improvement quest.

"Week 6 for the Blog Improvement Project is going to be pretty simple: trying out a new social media tool.















1. Pick out a new social media tool, or reacquaint yourself with a social media tool you already use. If you’re new, sign up and create an account.

(Check! I joined Twitter.)

Make sure to include your blog URL in your new profile so you can connect across social media platforms.

(Thanks to Cathy at Kittling: Books for mentioning Twitterfeed. That gave me instructions to link my blog to my Twitter page.)



2. Update your blog to include your new social media contact information.

(Check! I've got my tweets in my sidebar with a link taking you to my Twitter page.)






3. Spend the next three weeks actively using your new social media. For example, set a goal of tweets per day or how many comments you’ll leave on GoodReads reviews to make sure you give it a good shot.

(Check! I've just learned how to use the @ feature, which allows me to respond directly to a tweet from someone I follow or one of my followers.)













4. Don’t be afraid to connect with other people. Find authors, publishers, famous people, or bloggers that are 'bigger' than you and connect with them via social media. Don’t be intimidated, just try it!

(Check! At the moment I'm following 50 people, and 26 people are following me. High profile people I'm following on Twitter:
Gerard Butler - he's got 7599 followers
Stephen Colbert - 114,159 followers
Jon Stewart - 6931 followers
Kevin Smith - 115,411 followers
Seth MacFarlane - 13,167 followers
Seth Rogen - 10,386 followers
Ellen DeGeneres - 12,041 followers
Quentin Tarantino - 364 followers)

5. At the end of your three weeks using more social media, write up a post about how it worked for you. I’ll do another Social Media Carnival post at the end of March wrapping up what everyone learned." - Kim

So far, so good. I'm enjoying Twitter far more than I thought I would. It will be interesting to see if I notice any more traffic here at A Piece of My Mind in a couple of months.