Enhance your Social Media presence

So you´ve got yourself into Twitter and have been building a succesful PLN right there.  You have built a nice community in which you get and give useful information.  As a connected educator you are, you have a blog in which you share your thoughts.

One of the best ways to get attention to your blog post is sharing through social media.  If you are using Twitter, you might want to include popular hashtags; this will share your content with other than only your followers.  Let me introduce you some tools that might help increase your social presence, driving more traffic to your content, and therefore increasing your audience.


Twylah.  This is a service that automatically curates your tweets into a nicely built page.  It gives viewers a broader view of your niche and what you are up to.  It classifies your content according to your most popular topics.  You can edit this arrangement any time.  One of the most popular features of Twylah is the "Power Tweet".  A power tweet is one in which you share your link with your hashtags and information as you usually do; Twylah generates a link after your tweet that will lead to your Twylah page.  A power tweet can be more than 140 characters long.  You should go and give it a try.

Rebelmouse.  The concept behind this site is the same as Twylah, except that it also includes Facebook.  It will probably be adding more social networks in the future. One nice thing about the page is that it includes your latest picture, either on FB or Twitter, in big size in the front.  You can remove this anytime if you wish. It might be worth trying if you want others to get a glimpse of your content.

Ifttt.  This is a very useful app that will "put the Internet to work for you" (quoting apps slogan).  Basically, it allows you to create certain "recipes" of what you want to happen when you do this other thing on the web.  For example you can create a recipe in which everytime you favorite a Tweet it goes into your Evernote.  Here are some examples of recipes you can create:

Every time I tweet with the hashtag #fb, that tweet goes to my Facebook timeline.

This recipe adds my diigo´ed pages into Evernote

If you go to the site, you will see the enormous amount of recipes you could use or you could go ahead and create some yourself.

Bufferapp.  This is a fabulous tool to schedule tweets.  Interested in reaching your colleagues from Australia?  This is the app you´ll love.  You can determine the times in which you will be tweeting.  The free version allows you to schedule up to ten tweets.  Did I mention it also includes Facebook and LinkedIn?  That´s right: you can schedule ten tweets, ten FB statuses, and ten LI posts, all for free.  Within the goodies, a widget for your browser is included, in such a way that you can buffer tweets or posts directly from Twitter, FB, and LI.  It places a "buffer" button to your networks.

One of my dreams came true when I learned that Twylah and Bufferap got together.  This means that you can now buffer a power tweet!

Tweriod.  This is a tool that analyzes your followers to provide you when are the times in which they are active the most.  This information is pretty useful as you can schedule, using Buffer, when to tweet to target your audience more effectively.  Once your analysis is done, it will give you the option to connect with buffer and actually change your schedule into one suggested by Tweriod.  Simply nice.

I hope you feel encouraged to try these tools.  You have valuable content, and you have a voice; go ahead and show it to the world.  But do it effectively.  Of course, you will probably not see results overnight (I myself am in the process.) but just wait patiently.  Write, share, and collaborate.