Cyber Imprints

Social Media sites are websites that allows the subscribers or members of that website to socialize with one another through the sharing of comments, pictures, videos, and other online interactive activities. There are numerous social media websites that are present in the World Wide Web. Each of these websites caters to various groups and has their own strengths and weaknesses. Some of social media websites that I encountered through the years are Friendster, Facebook, Twitter, Multiply, Yahoo 360, and Plurk.

Social Media Optimization, or SMO, is the process of creating awareness of your blog through the use of social media websites. It is opposed to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that focuses more on increasing the rank of a blog in search engines. Because of the continued prominence of social media websites, successful bloggers utilized them to promote their blogs and reach out to more readers.

I also use SMO to promote my blog posts. The social media websites that I currently use for my SMO are Facebook, Twitter, and Friendster. Prominent bloggers already attested the effectiveness of Facebook and Twitter as SMO tool. I have not seen any review for Friendster.

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Friendster is one of the leading social websites in the Philippines and it still boasts of thousands of active Filipino users. Though, many of its veteran members shifted to Facebook. I observed that very few bloggers use Friendster as a blogging tool. 

The main page that is fronted to other Friendster users is the Profile page. This page contains the self-description of the Friendster user and the comments made by his/her friends. The profile page is the main page where a blogger can leave links leading to his/her blog. Bloggers could also use the Friendster bulletin for blog promotion.

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Facebook picked up the comment elements of Friendster and expanded it. Interactivity in Facebook is through posts that are posted by the Facebook user and is visible to all of his/her friend’s Facebook main page. His/her post can be commented by his/her friends and the comments are showed in a nested form. This ingenious mode in Facebook promotes online conversation because commenters reply to one another.

Facebook is more blogger friendly because it is easy to post links that lead to your blogs. An added bonus is the use of Networked Blogs that automatically pull your blog post and is ready to be posted on Facebook.

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Twitter is almost similar with Facebook in that it also uses the posting system that could be found in Facebook. The main difference is that you are limited to 140 characters (space included) for your posts or more popularly known as tweets. This limitation is not a disadvantage though because many people subscribed for this websites and that includes successful bloggers. Leaving a tweet could even be made through SMS messaging of mobile phones.

Of the three social media websites that I used, Friendster is the least effective, which is followed by Twitter. The most effective is Facebook. Friendster contributed 17% of the readers coming from social media sites, while Twitter contributed 33%. Facebook, meanwhile, contributed 50% of the visitors.

This simple statistics only shows that Friendster is not a good platform for social media optimization. The possible cause of this is that the facilities where I place links to my blogs is usually ignored by Friendster users. Whatever the reason, it only means that Friendster has to redefine itself to be more blogger friendly.

For better social media optimization, I suggest that you both use Facebook and Twitter. These two websites were somehow compatible with one another. An example of this compatibility is a Facebook application that posts your tweets on your Facebook wall. 

You can stay away from Friendster when doing social media optimization and you will not be missing anything.

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For more information on how to use Friendster as a blogging tool please read “How to Get Inbound Links to our Blog.”

Further comparison of Facebook and Friendster could be found at my article “Facebook vs Friendster.”

Logos of Facebook, Friendster, and witter are under the copyright of their respective owners.

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In the first part of this post, we talked about some “slow way” of getting links to your blog. Today, we will talk about some “easier ways” to plant inbound links on other websites.

As I had said in the first part of this post, our goal is to place our links on websites in a way that our links will not be ignored by the robots of the search engines. There are many websites out there that you could use to place your links on, however, there are only few of them that could be planted with links that are not ignored by Google.

Many people said that Friendster is dead, especially now that majority of its users are migrating to Facebook. However, I still view Friendster as an important tool for my blogs. My first reason is that Friendster is still a popular website and has high rank in Google. My second reason is that public profiles in Friendster can be crawled on by robots. Because of this, Friendster is a valuable site to plant your link on.

For starters, I placed the link of my blogs on my Friendster account. I made sure that my Facebook profile is open to public so as not to restrict Google’s robots from crawling. Next is to place a comment or testimonial on the profile of your Friendster contacts. Just make sure that your links are included in the comment. Imagine if you commented on 100 Friendster users then you have 100 links to your blog.

Guestbooks are usually placed by website administrators as a way to get feedbacks from their visitors. The problem with guest books is that they are usually not open to the robots. However, there are some of them that are open publicly and could be crawled on by robots. Most of these “open” guest books are found on government websites. You will know if the guestbook is open if the comments in the guestbook are shown in search engine results.

There are many blog directories out there and they could be found with just a click from Google. However, you must search for blog directories that do not demand payment from you or ask you to place widget or link on your blog. Their widget will serve as an outgoing link on your blog and will negatively affect your page rank. Look for free blog directories that have pages that could be crawled on by search engine robots.

I was wondering why many people are offering free blog templates. Are they so generous to exert time and effort to give us free templates? The answer is no. Creators of free blog templates place the links of their sites on their templates. Thus, if hundreds of people used their free blog templates, then they are guaranteed with 100 free inbound links to their site.

These are just few of the methods available to plant inbound links on other blogs or websites. There are other methods out there that you could use. If you know other techniques, please share it with us by leaving a comment.