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will be interested, and so on, until it has reached a large audience. The advantage, assum-
ing that it works, is that it's inexpensive, and that your message has been delivered by
people who the audience is actually willing to listen to—people they already know.The
difficulty is in creating something that is interesting to large audiences in the first place,
and in telling the right people about it so that they are interested in sharing in what
you've created. Taking advantage of social media is one way to accomplish the second
part of the task.
Regardless of the outlet, the two steps are to establish a presence and to be interesting.
Twitter (
http://twitter.com)
is one of the most popular social media sites these days. After
you've signed up for an account, you can follow other people on Twitter, and people who
find you interesting will follow you. There are a lot of people on the Web giving advice
on how to attract large numbers of followers, and there are a lot of people on Twitter
who follow thousands of people in hopes that people will follow them in return.
Focusing on follower counts is the wrong approach. Remember, the goal with social
media is to establish an audience of people who actually care about what you're doing.
Let's say you've created a new website for knitting enthusiasts, and in hopes of promot-
ing the site, you've created a Twitter account to go along with it.
NOTE
Creating a Twitter account is easy and free. To create a Twitter
account, you need only supply an account name, a full name, an
email address, and a password of your choosing. The account
name and full name can be anything you like. After you've followed
those steps, you're all set.
For starters, you should create posts on Twitter with links back to your site whenever you
publish something new. You should also follow people who say interesting things, prefer-
ably on the subject of knitting. And you should respond to them when you have some-
thing interesting to say, too. If you do so, eventually they may follow you in return. If
things go well, eventually you'll have a great outlet for promoting your site, and even if
they go poorly, you'll be participating in a community of people who like to talk about
the subject of your site—knitting. That's social media in a nutshell.
20
Creating a Facebook Page for Your Site
There's an additional way to promote your site on the popular social networking
site Facebook. You can create a page that represents your site to the Facebook
community. To do so, you need a Facebook account. After you've signed up, go to
http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages
and click Create a Page. You'll be taken
to the Create a Page form, shown in Figure 20.1.
