One of the problems with using social media to promote our articles is that most of us do not command the kind of authority that the top notch bloggers in our niche claim. A recent case at hand was when Google Wave was launched in public beta. We had several hundreds of blogs writing on the same subject, yet it was only the most popular blogs that garnered all the attention on the social media.

The problem here is a lack of perspective. In this particular case, most bloggers merely parrotted the same news that readers already knew, thus losing out in the social media traffic race. When the same news is presented with a different perspective, it is received much better. So here are two tips that you can make use of while writing on a topic that is likely to be on something written everywhere else and still be seen as unique.

Twitter Search

One of the easiest ways to capture attention is to be counter-intuitive in your posts. Let us take the example of ‘Google wave invites’ again. On that particular day, a Twitter search for Google Wave will show most twitterers saying one of these : “Google wave releases 100,000 invites” or “Need a Google wave invite”. This gives you the general mood of the ‘herd’. An article at this point about ‘Why it is better not to get a Google wave immediately’ or ‘Why a Google wave invite now makes no sense’ will surely catch your audience off-guard and it is likely to be shared more on social media.

TweetMeme

If you have not already known, Tweetmeme is like a Digg for tweets and lists links that are making the maximum wave on Twitter. While the homepage (or the category page) of Tweetmeme can give you the currently popular stories, what you should be interested is the search option. As you might know ‘How-to’ articles are among the most popular articles and tend to get shared pretty quickly. Search for “How to” followed by the topic you wish to cover. In the example mentioned above ‘How to Google wave’ will give you lesser known website links that have been covering an interesting perspective. You may write on a similar subject or you may use the titles to form your own clever how-to titles. While the same is possible with Google Blogsearch as well, in my experience, TweetMeme tends to be less spammy and more relevant to the keywords I look for.

The above two are just among the hundreds of different ways to use Twitter to find interesting topics for you to write on. However, as a means to providing a perspective to what you write, the above two tools can go a long way in helping you write articles that can be social media friendly.

Many blogs have links to add the current post to various social bookmarking site like Digg, Reddit, Delicious, etc. This blog don’t have it – but my LinDesk blog does. This effect is achieved using wordpress plugins like…

• S-ButtonZ Social Media Buttons – WordPress Plugin
• WordPress › Social Buttons
• Sociable – Social Bookmarking for WordPress
• Hacked WordPress Plugins
• WP Plugin: Gregarious
• I Love Social Bookmarking plugin
• WordPress › Add to Any Share/Save/Bookmark Button

For those who are new, this is part three of the Plugin Killer series. This series will show you how to duplicate the functionality of the a few wordpress plugins without having to install it using custom code in the wordpress theme. The earlier posts in this series are…

• Avoid Duplicate Content – Use Canonical URL in WordPress
• Show Popular Posts in WordPress – without a plugin

The Code

You can add social bookmarking button to your post by editing the single.php file in your theme. Go to the place in the file where you want the buttons to show up – then add this code at that location…

<a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php echo urlencode(the_title('','', false)) ?>">del.icio.us</a>
 | <a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<?php the_permalink() ?>">Digg it</a>
 | <a href="http://reddit.com/submit?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php echo urlencode(the_title('','', false)) ?>">reddit</a>
 | <a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php echo urlencode(the_title('','', false)) ?>">StumbleUpon</a>

Of course, you don’t have to do it like that – a better way of doing it is by putting the links in a li/ul list and then styling it. The point is, you don’t need a plugin to do this.

Different Implementations

Another thing I would recommend is get the images – in the above code, I just used text links. If you get the favicons of the sites you’re linking to, it will look a lot nicer. Example (go to the end of the post). You can use bigger images as well – example. Or use some kind of effect – example(here the icons are a bit transparent by default – but when you hover over them, it shows up clearly – its completely opaque).

Here only the four big ones are given. You can find code for more social bookmarking sites elsewhere.