Building A Social Media Hub

I’m a firm believer that your WordPress site should serve as the hub of you social media activities.  Over the course of three blog posts I will be telling why I think you should have WordPress as the hub, and social media as spokes on a wheel.  I will tell you how to configure your site and push updates to your social media presences

In this post lets set the groundwork for building your social media hub on WordPress.

Homebase and Outposts

I’ve written about the idea of homebases and outposts in the past, but I think it is worthwhile rehashing this concept as it is at the core of my social media hub concept.

Darren Rowse of Problogger fame first brought this idea to my attention, and it goes like this; your homebase is a property that you own, it’s somewhere that you crate your unique content and publish whatever you like.  No-one but you has control over that site but you.

An outpost is someone elses property that you go to and market your unique content.  This could be a social media site, guest posting on another blog, videos your create hosted on YouTube or one of many other outpost marketing strategies.

Create Your Content In WordPress and Syndicate To Outposts

Taking the homebase and outpost idea, let’s pad this out and explain what this means for WordPress site owners.

Your homebase is a self hosted WordPress site.  Sorry wordpress.com site owners, you are still publishing your content on an outpost, you are creating content on someone elses property.

On your self hosted WordPress site you have total control over what you can create, when it is published any editorial control over that content.  You control the comments, and feedback to your content.

You don’t have that on an outpost, with my social media hub concept you have complete control over your message. something you do not have if you are trusting your unique content to be hoisted on an outpost.

Social Media Sites  Should Never Be Your HomePage

You should NEVER make your homebase on someone elses property.

You do not have control over your content on an outpost, you have no say over the editorial policy, you don;t have control over whether or not you are kicked off an outpost. You have no control over what shoddy ads are being displayed next to your content (and you are not earning any money from ad clicks, I’m lo0king at your Facebook).

I hear people say that they are making their Facebook presence their homebase, because that is where  the people are – WRONG, syndicate your content to your Facebook page but make your permanent homebase your WP site.  Why? Because if for whatever reason you piss Facebook off and go against their T & Cs they can ban you from the site and with one fell swoop remove your content, your audience and your influence.  With a homebase this cannot happen.

The Big Three

I’m going to focus on the big three networks throughout this series, they are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  In the rest of this series I will show you how to create a social media hub with WordPress at the centre syndicating your content

Sorry YouTube, I’m not talking about you in this series, I’ll focus  on you with a multi media series soon.

Create A Social Media Hub

When you create a social media hub it very easily allows you to market the content and drive traffic to your homebase.

Create your content once on the hub, and push it out to multiple social media sites and enjoy the benefits of viral sharing and distribution,  this in turn creates more traffic to your site and hopefully exposure to your products or services you sell via your site (or ad clicks if you are a problogger).

The Outpost Time Suck

Spending a lot of time marketing your content on social media is a huge time suck, if you stick with me throughout this series I will show you how to configure your site to automatically update all three social media sites very quickly. I will also show you how to aggregate all your social media updates back to your site so all of your audience be they site visitors or social media friends

Next Up

In the next post in this series I will tell you how to link you WordPress to automatically integrate with your social media presences.  This is a much more practical post where I will show you what plugins, configurations and Facebook applications to use.

If you would like to be notified when the next post in this series is available, why not sign up for my mailing list and I will send you an email when the post is ready.