Sometimes people who are making good use of a social media platform still overlook a basic step or two. Like including a web link in your profile.
Take a few moments to check out your basic profiles on such social tools as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or About.me. Twitter allows a single link in your profile. Others allow multiple links (I have lots of links in my Google and About.me profiles and still haven’t hit the limit, if there is one).
Link to your blog or your news organization’s web page or both. This will boost your traffic as well as give people who are considering following you a chance to check you out further. Whether you are trying to build credibility with a source or a reader or hoping to impress a prospective employer, a link helps them learn more about you. And several links helps them learn a lot.
While you’re checking out your profile, make sure you have a good photo, logo or other graphic as your avatar. It amazes me how many journalists use Twitter’s default egg avatar, which screams “newbie.” Fill out your bio, too, identifying yourself as a journalist with your particular organization. If you can list your beat or position, that helps, too.
Thanks to Karen Workman of the Oakland Press who developed a couple of instructional pdfs to walk you through the steps of adding a link to your Twitter or Facebook profile.
[…] Include a web link in your Twitter or Facebook profile. […]
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Another option: Set up a central site using either http://flavors.me or http://about.me and use that as the URL you put on all your personal collateral — email signature, personal business cards, everything. You can also create a QR code out of the link. (YES, Gene Weingarten, this is personal branding.) From that central site you can send people to your blog, tumblr, Twitter account, Facebook page, LinkedIn profile, flickr stream, YouTube channel and a bunch of other places. I happen to prefer flavors.me because it has a setting that will actually pull in your most recent entries from whichever one of your social media profiles you specify, and I don’t think about.me will do that. I would also recommend paying the minimal amount to buy your own domain name.
I believe that if you click on my name where it appears with this comment it will take you to my (very basic) flavors.me site.
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Thanks, Elaine! Now I have to check out flavors.me. Because I don’t have nearly enough profiles. It does look more flexible than About.me.
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