These days, it’s vital to make it easy to for people to find you on social networks and to encourage them to connect with you there.
I’ve recently added a new button my website, using a service called Social Follow. Below my photo in the right column, look for the button featuring icons for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and RSS feeds. It looks like this:
In addition to these major social networks, you can add icons for numerous other services including Blogger, WordPress, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, YouTube, Flickr, Squidoo, Hub Pages, MySpace, Ning, Shelfari, and more.
You can create multiple buttons for different sites within the same Social Follow account, and you can also set up a Profile on the Social Follow site.
To get started, register at Social Follow and follow the steps to create your button. For step-by-step instructions on how to create your Social Follow button and profile, see this free tutorial from Just the FAQs. If you're a TypePad user like me, you can copy the button code into a Notes TypeList and place it in your sidebar.
Before you begin, you will need to already have an account on the social services that you wish to include on your button, and you’ll also need to know your personal URL for each of your social sites. Usually, you can find the URL by looking at the URL in your browser when you are on your profile page for your favorite social sites. For example, my URL on Twitter is http://twitter.com/BookMarketer.
Give Social Follow a try and watch your followers and contacts increase!
Hi Dana,
Thanks for the great review and the PDF Tutorial on setting up Social Follow. In your pdf you have a note that when editing the button you have to click back to through all the steps to save the button, can't do it from step 2 for example. Based on this great observation we have updated the system so there is a Save link on each of the 3 steps so you can edit your button save right away. Thanks for your support!
Rafferty Pendery
SocialFollow.com
Posted by: Rafferty Pendery | February 24, 2010 at 01:06 AM
Dana, thank you for including a reference to my tutorial in your post. Delighted to see that it caught the attention of the folks at SocialFollow and that they are making a minor tweak to their wonderful service. I'll be sure to update the tutorial to reflect that change. Look for a new one soon.
MaAnna Stephenson
JustTheFAQs.net
Posted by: MaAnna Stephenson | February 24, 2010 at 10:11 PM
Wow, what a great example of the power of Web 2.0! I'm delighted to see that the folks at SocialFollow saw this post and make a change to their site as a result, and MaAnna is changing her tutorial based on their comment.
Dana
Posted by: Dana | February 25, 2010 at 08:05 AM