Tactical Execution

I continue to be amazed at the opportunities to integrate your online activities on different platforms.  I’ve written about this before, specifically as it pertains to Twitter and Utterz, but wanted to write another post to describe some of the other tools I’ve stumbled upon recently.

This Tactical Execution website is build on WordPress and there are a number of things you can do to integrate your blog with your other social media accounts.  Last week, I installed a plugin entitled Twitter Tools.  It basically does three basic things.  First, if you post a tweet, it will automatically create a post in your blog presenting the contents for your website visitors.  Second, if you post a blog post (like this one, for example), it will automatically post a tweet announcing your post to your twitter audience and telling them where to find it.  And finally, it allows you to post a tweet from your WordPress dashboard.

I originally installed the plugin because of this last feature.  I don’t do a lot of texting and never get around to visiting my twitter account so the ability to post a tweet when I’m managing my website is a great feature.  But since I’ve installed the plugin, I’ve come to appreciate the first two features as well and have noticed an increase in traffic to my blog as a result.  I’ve also had a number of new people start following me on twitter.

In my post about twitter and utterz, I described the ability to make one cell phone call into the utterz platform and automatically populate your twitter account, your website (via the blue widget you can see on the left hand side of this website) and your facebook profile (because twitter integrates nicely with facebook).  Well, it turns out that facebook can be seamlessly integrated with your blog as well.  By going to your “Notes” page, you can add the RSS feed from your blog and have your facebook profile be updated every time you write a new blog post.

Between my website, facebook, twitter and utterz, all my activity is completely integrated.  I am now looking at ways to integrate other platforms like LinkedIn or BlogCatalog or YouTube.  I’m sure there are and just have to allocate some time to do the research and then take the steps necessary to complete the process.  My point is that your digital footprint grows exponentially when you integrate your different audiences and it doesn’t cost a thing.

This same concept is true for so many things.  Take YouTube videos.  If you do just one video, you’ll most likely get lost in the thousands of other videos.  But if you do a series, you broaden your reach.  Think about it like a fishing net.  You want your net as big as possible, catching people in different ways and for different reasons.  But once they see one of your videos, they’ll quickly see all the other stuff you’ve done.  And at that point, the cross-polination increases the traffic to all your videos, not just the original one.

With all the social media platforms, you can see the same effect.  You have friends on facebook.  You have followers on twitter and utterz.  You have fans on YouTube and visitors to your website.  Regardless how they find you initially, they can immediately be introduced to all the other stuff you do, augmenting your online identity and increasing your traffic at the same time.