Social Media Buttons for Sharing Information

At the bottom of each blog post are a series of little icons that enable you to share various blog posts that you’ve found particularly useful. Brad, our expert guest bloggers, and I all appreciate your sharing our content with other folks in the Vistage Community when you read something you thought worthy of sharing.

At a fundamental level – that’s the way blogging and social media works. Someone writes a blog post or shares something interesting they found on the Web that has a few good take-away points, you like it, and share it with your friends, associates, acquaintances, the Members of your Group, other Vistage Chairs, your favorite Speakers and Trusted Advisors.

So, what are these buttons?

Delicious: Delicious is a popular on-line bookmarking site. You can store all your bookmarks here and you can share all your bookmarks with those looking for similar content. Posting your bookmarks on subject matter expert areas is one of the strategies to personally brand YOU. See my list of bookmarks on Delicious as an example. You have be logged into your Delicious Account to post bookmarks.

Facebook: You can share a valuable blog post with your contacts on Facebook. Once you click the button, you’ll have an opportunity to enter the post into your news feed on Facebook. Obviously, you have to be logged into your Facebook account for this to work.

Digg: Digg is similar to Delicious as one of the most popular bookmark sharing sites on the Internet. The content that Digg and Delicious have accumulated is exceptional. One of the key places I do my research now in addition to Google is to go to Digg and Delicious to see how others have voted on various websites and blog postings.

Email: This button will allow you to forward the link of a blog article you found interesting to someone in your email address book. The system picks up whatever email program is your default – such as Outlook.

Google Bookmarks: This allows you to save interesting articles you find so that you can refer back to them at a later point. For example, if you read the blog postings of one of the feeds on this portal site, you might want to bookmark a particularly interesting blog post.

Twitter: Twitter is all the rage on the Internet. It is a micro-blogging platform where you can send 140 character mini-messages to those following you. For example, I have almost 7,000 people following me on Twitter around two different categories – executive job search and hiring talent. Many of those individuals join our LinkedIn Discussion Group, download our free materials, and purchase our products/services. Approximately 10% of our web site traffic comes from Twitter.

It’s a viral environment where people who like what you have to say repost to their network. It’s another form of personal branding and differentiation. You should have a Twitter Account. You can look at my profile and see one of my lists of  Vistage Community Members using Twitter.

The primary way Twitter gets used is to make a statement/ask a question, repost the tweet someone else wrote (called retweeting), and post a link to something you found useful.

LinkedIn: This button will allow you to repost the blog article to any of the LinkedIn Groups you participate in. It automatically creates an entry in the news feed of the group. You can select the specific group you would like to post the news item (blog post) into to share with other members of the various LinkedIn Discussion Groups.

Barry Deutsch

Graphic courtesy of DavidZimm