Part of social media is monitoring your buzz. You want to know what people are saying about you. A great resource to use that will save you time is an RSS feed which stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. You can use RSS in so many ways and they will help you save time by creating automations that will work for you and not against you.

Setting up your RSS reader is easier then you may realize. Follow these steps and you’ll be monitoring your social media in no time:

Set up a Google Reader Account – Any website that has an RSS feed can be tracked with your Google Reader, which by the way is free. You will however, need a Google account. As a side note, it might be advisable to set up a separate Google account to monitor your social media with. It’s also advisable to have one Google account for each niche in your business. This makes it easier to keep track of your social media for each area.

Set up Google Alerts – You’ll want to use keywords that are relevant to your niche. When setting your delivery option, be sure to set it to feed instead of email. Take heed that you may need to edit the feed in order to get it set up this way. Now simply click create. You want to set up an alert for each keyword, key phrase, business name as well as any other unique phrases that you may use on your website and/or blogs.

RSS feeds are going to simplify the way you monitor the buzz for all your niches and your business name as well. The best part is you’ll be able to do it all with one glance on a single page. If you use a virtual assistant you can actually have them set this all up for you and monitor it a few times a day. By having them send you a daily report of anything important that happens, you’ll stay on top of your social media buzz.

Dig a little deeper by using Twitter Search to add a Twitter feed to your Google Reader. By adding your keywords and then clicking on “Feed for this query”, you’ll be able to monitor what’s being said about you on Twitter.

As you plan out the content for your website or blog, one of the things you should consider incorporating are blog interviews. Blog interviews are basically when you connect with an industry expert by providing questions that they in turn answer. Then you take your questions, their answers and create the blog interview as part of a blog post.

In developing your blog interview content, there are a few things you should keep in mind. Below is a list that should be helpful to you:

• Create a list of industry expert that you would like to potentially interview. Don’t be shy with your list. You should look at those who have influence in your industry and who share great information via social media.
• Prepare an initial contact email or message that you send to your potential interviewees when you ask them if they are open to being interviewed.
• Determine a basic set of questions that you want to send to your potential interviewers. Also ask them to include additional questions that they provide the answers to when responding.
• When you receive the questions back, copy/paste them into a blog post along with a headshot of the interviewee.
• Make sure to include the interviewee’s contact information in the blog post, usually at the bottom.
• Once the blog post has been created and made live, send a link of the blog post to the interviewee and ask them to share with their followers.
• Create a press release via http://PRLog.com that informs others that you have created an expert blog interview and then link back to the blog post.

For an example of an expert blog interview, please check out “Social Media Strategist: Aliza Sherman“. This was an expert interview that I conducted with Aliza Sherman where she shared great information about social media.

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The creation of an acronym for the word F.A.C.E.B.O.O.K. was developed to help you look at it through new eyes as a good way to be transparent and successful on Facebook. Share in this article are a few tips to help you in your journey of learning how to use Facebook to grow your business.

One way that you can think of Facebook is as a business component that is an extension of your business. As an extension of your business, Facebook can help you reach others online that you may not have had the opportunity to reach.

Below is the acronym to help you remember how you can use F.A.C.E.B.O.O.K. in unique ways:

• F: Friendly should always be the way you choose to be positive with others via Facebook. Even if someone doesn’t treat you respectably, you shouldn’t respond negatively. As a business owner, your online presence is very important and how you treat others need to reflect this.
• A: Access to you is something you clients and business partners like to have when doing business with you. Using some of the communication applications that Facebook provides is a way to build in accessibility. Doing a search in the Application of Facebook will render many helpful application such as Social RSS or Clobby.
• C: Connecting with your mentors, clients and business partner via Facebook means that you are able to have an open dialog or communication stream with them. This could allow you to attract new clients or business associates.
• E: Encouraging others is another way to grow your circle of influence on Facebook because being positive draws others to you. As you encourage others in a positive way then you too will receive encourage from those you are connected to via Facebook.
• B: Building your reputation online in your industry is another good example of how you can use Facebook. As you connect with others and share your information, your reputation with grow.
• O: Opportunity to network is one of the main reason to use Facebook. As you network, keep in mind that being pushy can be seen as negative. Show respect to others and get their permission before you blast them with information about you and your products.
• O: Overflowing goodwill is a great thing because you will be given the opportunity to give to others through your overage. Such as giving away freebies to those who “like” your fanpage on Facebook.
• K: Knowledge-sharing is important to growing your circle of influence online. By sharing your knowledge with others, you can become known as a subject-matter-expert which can help you cultivate a speaking career.

Hopefully, these tips will encourage you to implement Facebook in your business if you haven’t already. If you have implemented it in your business, maybe you learned something new that you can do to use Facebook to grow your business.

Growing your business online using Facebook is an important step for business owners. With the growth and changes of the Facebook environment, it can be confusing at times. Well, I want to provide you with a few tips to help you navigate the waters of Facebook.

These tips can help you grow your website traffic along with encouraging people to connect with you Facebook account as a friend or a fan on your Fanpage. As a business owner you can then communicate about your products or services to those you are connected with via Facebook.

Below are a few tips that will help you implement Facebook to grow your business:

• Connect Facebook Fanpage to Twitter. Allows you to have your fanpage automatically update your Twitter account when it is updated.
• Add a Like button to your website. The Like button lets a user share your content with friends on Facebook. When the user clicks the Like button on your site, a story appears in the user’s friends’ News Feed with a link back to your website.
• Add recommend option to website. The Recommendations plugin shows personalized recommendations to your users. Since the content is hosted by Facebook, the plugin can display personalized recommendations whether or not the user has logged into your site.
• Add Like Box to your website. The Like Box is a social plugin that enables Facebook Page owners to attract and gain Likes from their own website.
• Share Live Stream to your website. The Live Stream plugin lets users visiting your site or application share activity and comments in real time. The Live Stream Box works best when you are running a real-time event, like live streaming video for concerts, speeches, or webcasts, live Web chats, webinars, massively multiplayer games.

These are just a few of the ways you can integrate Facebook into your website. Did I miss any? If you know of any other ways to integrate Facebook into a website, please feel free to share.

With the release of the early Beta version of WordPress 3.0, there are a few new things that will help you continue to take advantage of the functionality that WordPress gives its users. One of the new things that you will be able to do is Create a Network.

When you create a network, it means that you will be able to turn the single version of WordPress into a multi-site version just by changing a few things:

• Changing one line in the “wp-config.php” file
• Changing settings on the backend of the WordPress installation. If you are not technical, I would suggest that you leave this up to someone who understands the core files of WordPress. Otherwise, if you make a mistake, you could cause the entire install to stop working.
• Additionally, your server will need to be capable of handling DNS Wildcard

This is just a simple overview regarding the new feature of “creating a network”. To get more details, visit the WordPress Codex: Create a Network.