Put the beef into your social media identity

Photo by Karen Runtz

Think about the volume of email you create or respond to.  What if every one of those messages had links to your social networking profiles.  Connecting your email signature with your social media identity is a great marketing tool, especially if you customize by audience.

I mentioned the Social Media Examiner as a great resource in my last post: 11 voices worth listening to.  One of their new posts talks about the top six mistakes in social media and how to fix them.

Mistake #2 is “hiding your social media presence”.  The writer, Kristi Hines, shows simple ways of promoting social networking profiles by displaying them on websites and business cards, as a signature in forums and through social links in email.

My eyes were pulled to the clean but effective email example shown.  My email signature already had a link to my WordPress blog but compared to Kristi’s example, my signature block was an Angus burger without the beef (or the equivalent for my vegetarian friends).

That’s now changed.  I’m happy to have a much meatier signature that shows my social media connections as well as an RSS link to my latest blog post.  I’m leaving it “basic black” for now, but I can accessorize as I want.  I’ll be adding the coordinates for my Facebook page, for instance, once it’s done.

Karen's email signature

WiseStamp is a free add-on for Firefox, Google chrome and works with any webmail service such as Gmail, yahoo, aol and  hotmail.  Their website notes that set ups for Safarai and Mac are coming soon and that they’re “working hard” to expand WiseStamp into other browsers and email clients like Outlook.

To set up the signature you can either select one of the templates or follow the WYSIWYG editor to create your own, which is what I did.  One tip: if you want to add the RSS feed for your WordPress blog, you need to add the backslash and feed as in “/feed” to your blog address.

WiseStamp also allows you to add your signature to just about any webpage (as long as it supports HTML).