As a conservative activist and new media enthusiast, I have taken particular interest in the number of local, or smaller, blogs that have sprung up with the rise of the tea party movement. No two blogs are the same (or even look the same) and each blogger has a completely different way of expressing their disgust for all things Obama & Co. With each conservative blog that springs up on the interwebs, we can do a small victory dance that liberals no longer lay claim to technology and electronic communication.

Part of my role as a social media consultant involves finding and monitoring the conversation on the blogosphere, so I spend a good amount of time looking at individual blog sites. My experience has taught me this: the conservative movement may have found its voice online, but in some instances our delivery has left a bit to be desired.

These five tips are my quick suggestions for ways to better format your blogs, grow your audience, share your content online, and influence your communities.

1. Include Contact Information. This is perhaps my most important tip for bloggers. I have tried and failed to contact many blog sites with news information because there simply wasn’t any contact information listed. I understand that many bloggers choose to remain anonymous and I actually wouldn’t recommend including your personal email address. However it is easy to create a free gmail account in the form of yourblogname@gmail.com where interested parties can contact you. Create an account and be sure it is listed on the front page of your site! You never know what information or interesting tips you might be missing out on.

[Note: This also strongly applies to all tea party groups and local campaigns. If you do not have contact information listed, people cannot get involved and other groups cannot inform you of upcoming events that your group may be interested in!]

2. Include An About Page. Similar to including contact information, including an about page helps readers and other interested parties get to know you and your blog just a little bit better.  You can retain anonymity while providing readers with insight into your potential expertise about the topics you are blogging about, your political ideology, and your location. For example, your blog post about efforts to raise the cap on charter schools in the North Carolina General Assembly may carry more weight if your readers know you have been teaching in the NC public school system for over two decades.

Additionally, many statewide blogs and nonprofits looking to build out their blogrolls and link to local blogs, will look for keywords such as “North Carolina,” “conservative,” and “politics” in an about section of your blog before they will take the time to read through your blog posts to try to decipher your point of view.

3. Make Sharing Easy. Whether you are on social networks yourself, you should assume and hope that your readers are and make sharing your blog content an easy and inviting task for them. If your blog is hosted on Wordpress, there are easy plugins that will integrate a share bar, the Facebook Like button, and Tweetmeme button directly into your blog with little work from you. If your blog is hosted on another site, Facebook will generate the Like button for you and you should still have options for sharing and Tweeting. These easy plugins allow your readers to share your blog posts with their social networks with very few clicks.

You will also want to include an RSS feed button on your website. This button allows readers who use tools such as Google Reader to aggregate all of their blog feeds into one place to easily subscribe to your blog. Many readers may subscribe to your blog without the RSS button, but the icon is a nice visual reminder to do so.

4. Consider Your Readers. Every once in a while you should step back and take a look at your blog from a reader’s point of view. Is the font too small? Do the colors make it hard to read? Are the pictures in your recent posts bigger than your post column? All of these things make your blog unpleasant to look at and, while your mother and wife may stick around to read it, very few others will.

There are two important points to remember when it comes to blog design: 1) Less is definitely more (this includes columns, pictures, dancing elephants, ads, links, and other general distractions) and 2) Our internet attention spans are very short. If your blog is hard to read or I have to constantly scroll or click to actually find your content, I won’t stick around and, worse, I will think you aren’t serious about blogging.

If you are unsure about your blog design, ask for feedback from members of your local tea party or other conservative groups. Members of your target audience are the best people to ask for feedback!

5. Focus Local. This last point is more about our movement than blog formatting in general and I am by no means the first to write about it. What you have to offer the blogosphere and conservative movement is your unique perspective about what is happening in your town, county, and even state. There are many, many bloggers here in North Carolina, but very few covering the General Assembly and even fewer covering local town councils. If you shift your focus from Obamacare and other national issues and become one of a few bloggers focusing locally, the impact on your local community and the conservative movement could be huge.

Take these 5 tips back to your blog or pass them on to your favorite blogger! And, as always, please let me know if you have any questions!

Happy blogging!

Next to “suggesting to friends,” the share button is the easiest and most effective way to share information from Pages or other profiles with your Facebook friends. When you share a story on Facebook, that story appears in your friends’ newsfeed and on your Facebook profile.

Using the Share button

The most frequent use for the “Share” button on Facebook is on Page posts. It’s important to note here that when you share a Facebook post, you are sharing the content or link and the Page where it came from, but not any introductory text the Page had included with the post. This also means that you can’t share status updates. Note the two screenshots below. The first is a Page post and the second is a status update:

When you decide to share a post, you will have the option of sending the post as a link in a personal message or posting it on your profile and your friends’ newsfeed.  There are benefits to both of these methods, but one benefit to posting to your profile is that many more people on Facebook will see the post. The screenshot below shows where to click to switch between the two options. Once you’ve picked your method, choose whether to add a personal message, and click Share.

If you opted to share the message, your post will appear on your profile and in your friends’ newsfeed. However, remember the lists we made in the first section of this series? This is where these come in because instead of sharing the message with all of your friends, you have the option of sharing only with certain people or specific lists. To do that, instead of clicking “share”, select the lock symbol just next to the share button. A box will drop down. Select customize to use lists.

When you select customize, the box below will pop up.

To use your list, click on the drop down box that says “Only Friends” and select “Specific People.” Then type the name of the list you made in the box. In this example, the name of my list is “Conservative NC Politics.”

Once you are done selecting your list, click “save setting.” You will know that you added your list properly because when you click on the lock image, the drop down box will now look like this:

That’s it! Now just click share and you are done!

Conclusion

This wraps up our series on Facebooking for Activists. Campaign season is heating up and there are a lot of good, conservative candidates who need your help to spread their message. Pick a few in your area and start sharing their posts, notes, and links and be sure to suggest their Pages to your friends!

Suggest to Friends is an ideal set up for word-of-mouth marketing in Facebook. For activists who may be reluctant to frequently bombard their friends with status updates and Facebook messages, the “Suggest to Friends” function is the perfect solution.

Many Facebook Page administrators will ask you to help them spread the word about the Page by “suggesting it to your friends.” This is a really important tool on Facebook that allows you to easily invite new fans to your favorite pages with a few simple clicks.

My ideal day as a Facebook Page administrator would be for each of my Page’s fans to suggest the Page to each of their Facebook friends. Imagine how many people you could reach! I realize this won’t happen, but I would like to walk you through the “Suggest to Friends” process in hopes you’ll opt to share quality conservative Pages with your friends and family more often than not.

Suggest to Friends

To begin, go to your favorite Facebook Page, look at the options located just under the profile picture, and click “Suggest to Friends.”

The box that pops up when you click “Suggest to Friends” contains all of your friends and in order to suggest the Page to your friends, you have to individually click on their names. This is time-consuming and I’m positive it’s the reason more of you aren’t suggesting! Luckily, the lists you created after reading “Using Facebook Lists” will make this process much, much easier!

Click “Filter Friends” and select the list you want to use from the drop down box. For this example, I am using a list I created called “ConservativeNC Politics.”

Once you have filtered the friend selection by your list, Facebook will allow you to “Select All” to suggest the page to all the friends in that list. If you still want to narrow your friends from here, go through and handpick them individually.

Click “Send Invitation” and you’re done!

Suggesting Facebook Pages to your friends is the fastest and easiest way to spread the message about new candidates or nonprofits. The conservative causes you support on Facebook are depending on you to help them get their message out.

Use Facebook lists to make that process easier and start suggesting today! If you’d like a practice round, feel free to suggest Majority Connections to all your friends!

As an administrator for many Facebook Pages, I spend a lot of time asking Facebook fans and other supporters to share Pages, Groups, links, Notes, and more with their Facebook friends. The goal of these posts is to give you a few tips for sharing and spreading the conservative message to your friends and family on Facebook.

The first installment in this series will explain how to use Facebook Lists to target specific Facebook friends.  The second and third posts will then walk you through how to use those lists to share links and suggest great conservative pages to your friends.

Using Facebook Lists

For many of us, including myself, our Facebook friends include people with whom we don’t necessarily want to share our political views. Having been on Facebook since my freshman year of college, I’ve accumulated many former professors, colleagues, church friends, my brothers ex-girlfriends, former bosses, and even family members who I know will not appreciate frequent updates in their news feed about Sarah Palin’s Facebook Notes (this one is a good read) or the latest campaign Facebook Page I’m recommending (this one). Thus, I share your hesitancy to broadcast your political opinions to all of your Facebook connections.

The good news is Facebook allows you to categorize your friends into different lists and then target your updates according to those lists. This process takes a little time and effort on the front end, but you will find it really helpful once complete.

To get started, go to your home page or newsfeed page on Facebook. Look for this box in the upper left-hand corner and click “more”:

The list will be expanded.  Select “create new list”:

A box will pop up with pictures of all of your Facebook friends, groups, and pages.

Type in the name for your list and scroll through your Facebook friends to find the people you want to put in that list (select them by clicking on their picture).  Once you’ve selected your list, click “Create List.” Go back to the Facebook home page where you should now see your list in the top left hand corner.

That’s the play by play for creating Facebook lists. In the next installment of this series, I will show how to put these new lists to work to help you more easily and comfortably spread the conservative message.

I hope you’ll take the time to glance through these guides and share them with other activists who might need a hand!  2010 is going to be a great year for us, but we have to work together to get there! Get Facebooking!

MC is committed to helping conservative groups of all sizes and scopes create their own, unique social networking and new media strategies in a cost-effective manner.  MC will work with your group to assess your best options for a successful online community, establish your social media presence, maintain your accounts, and provide monthly reviews of your campaigns.  After you’ve implemented your new social networking strategy, a New Media Training Session is a great way to teach your activists about your new social networking efforts and get them engaged in your online communities.

Consulting Services Include:

• Social Network Account Creation and Maintenance (ex. Facebook, Ning, Wordpress, Twitter, etc.)
• Community Moderation
• Monthly Review of Social Network Campaigns
• Reputation Management
• Branding and Campaign Management
• 24/7 Support

New Media Training Sessions Answer Questions Like:

• What is “Social Media”?
• Do I need a Facebook Page or Profile?
• How do I get more followers on Twitter?
• What is #TCOT?
• Should our group Tweet in first person?
• I want to start my own blog- where do I begin?
• How are other conservative groups using Twitter and Facebook?
• Can we fundraise on Twitter?

Learn more about Consulting and Training services and contact Majority Connections about your social networking needs today!

Building a quality account and a strong Twitter following takes some time and effort, but with these five (often-overlooked) steps you are guaranteed to be on the right track:

1. Fill in the following information: name, location, time zone, website, and a bio. Each of these things makes you easier to find and subsequently more enticing to follow.
2. Upload a picture. Preferably a picture incorporating your campaign, group logo, or, at the very least, your group name. (NOTE: For your individual Twitter account, upload a picture of yourself).
3. Change the design. Choose colors that represent your group.
4. Change the background. Upload your group’s logo for the background (select ‘tile background’ for a full background). If you aren’t happy with the look your logo provides, try a site like twitterbackground.com or twitbacks.com where you can create a custom Twitter background.
5. Tweet with hashtags. The best way to add quality followers and reach your target audience is through hashtags (search terms that begin with ‘#’). For a general conservative audience, try #TCOT (Top Conservatives on Twitter). For a more specific topic, follow the #tcot updates to see which hashtags are popular for other topics. Finally, create your own hashtag for your specific group. For example, #NRA for the National Rifle Association or #RS for RedState.com.

(NOTE: Steps 1-4 can be found under the ‘Settings’ tab in the top left corner of your Twitter screen.)

These tips seem simple (and are), but they are also really important steps for creating a quality Twitter account that people will want to follow. Even if you’ve already had your Twitter account for a while and you haven’t done some of the basics (like filling out your bio or uploading your organization’s logo), take a few seconds to do it now. I promise you will see a difference!

Do you have other Quick Twitter Tips to add? Leave them in the comments. And, as always, if you have any questions or want more advice about using Twitter, leave a comment or email Jessica.