The Data Web, Social Web, how to Publish and Tweet in the future

Anyone who’s been on the web for awhile is familiar with the “Data Web”- this web is powered by Search engines like Google and Bing (formerly Live Search).  The Data Web is easy to understand; a web crawler goes out on the web and indexes the content of web site pages.  Visitors to the search engines type in their search terms and if your pages match the terms and content (with lots of other secret criteria depending on the engine) the visitor should see your pages in the “natural” or “not paid” results.

The “Social Web” is an entirely different beast. Remember when Dean Martin sang “You’re nobody ‘til somebody loves you”? Well, nobody is going to give you love unless you give them a reason. Today, the reason is (for business folk) compelling content filled with good advice. If you’re not blogging, your competitors likely are. With free services like Wordpress.org there really is no excuse not to- I prefer to have the blog linked to the main web site rather than free services, though I do have some on different domains than my main sites. Make sure you also create and publish or expose an RSS feed for your blog.  In addition to blogging, you should probably use twitter too. If you’re not familiar with twitter, it’s sort of like “micro-blogging”. You are limited to 160 total characters so you can use twitter to “tweet” about your full article or other news with a compelling headline. Make sure what you tweet adds value, people won’t follow you long if your tweets look like spam.

Automate your Social Web

Another feature of some blogging platforms or Content Management Systems is to create the article and set it to publish in the future. For example, this article was created days prior to posting. The Modx CMS I use has this article set to publish at a future date, when the time is right- it will just show up on the web site. This allows you to get started blogging and update your site regularly (something Google likes) without running out of steam. I recommend you create ten or so articles in advance and try to write a new one each day. If you use WordPress (hosted or on installed on your site) and write using Word 2007, you can post your articles directly from Word using Publish->Blog. How cool is that?

For automated tweeting you can try futuretweets.com (free). Just create your tweet, set the date and time to be just after your post is published, and include a link to the posted article. Now you can have a big part of your social web automated- so go get your Twitter.com account, write some content on your blog, tweet about it, build your list of followers, and enjoy the results. You should find as you build more content that your site will naturally build inbound links and when you get hundreds of pages indexed about your topics, you should see positive results. This is all free to do, but it is work- there is no reason to avoid it now that you know- even if you must hire someone to write for you.  With the downsizing of so many newspapers there are lots of well qualified journalists are available today.

Of course there are many other components to the Social Web; some of these include:

Reddit.com, FaceBook.com, Digg, LinkedIn, and of course the major search engines themselves are now seriously taking an approach to capitalize on the Social Web.