In our prior post, we discussed how to create social accounts. We also touched on how to link social accounts:

If you have more than one LavaLinx account, you can select which accounts you would like to use a particular social site on. For example, lets say you add Digg as a social site. You have it on your main account, but you don’t want it on your secondary account. This is where you would navigate to change that, and vice-versa; If you want to bookmark on a secondary account site, you will need to go to [the Social Boomarks] page and link your social account with it.

This quick tutorial will go over in detail how to link up your social accounts with all of your LavaLinx accounts. Below, we have five social bookmarking accounts created, however in the bottom left box, you’ll see that there are zero of five social bookmarking accounts currently linked. To change this, click on the “Manage” tab of “Linked with (your account name)“.

Now you can see our five social accounts, our username, and a check box on the far right side.

Check the box of whichever social accounts you would like to have linked to this LavaLinx account. We’ve checked three. By selecting these, you are indicating to LavaLinx that during social trading, other LavaLinx users may request trades to your site using those selected social accounts. It also enables private bookmarking on those accounts.

You will NOT be able to bookmark on a social site if it is not linked. For example, you can see the Delicious and Reddit are not checked, so you would not be able to save a bookmark on either Delicious or Reddit for this LavaLinx account.

If you return to the Social Bookmarks page (middle button on the top navigation), you can see that we now have three of five social accounts linked with this LavaLinx account.

You would continue linking whichever social accounts you prefer on each LavaLinx account.

Are you tired of the hassle that comes with creating social accounts? If so, LavaLinx’s unique social account creation could help you. From this section, you are able to create, delete, modify and  add multiple social accounts that will accurately and efficiently track the number of social bookmarks received for your pages.

To begin, log on to your LavaLinx account.

Next, click on the “Social Bookmarks” tab in the middle of the top navigation bar.

That will bring us to this page, where you will come to manage your social accounts. Let’s take a look at each individual section of this page.

The first box states the number of Social Bookmark Accounts you have created (seen here, the number is zero). It also gives you a number of how many public and private social accounts you may create.

We have over eighty-five social sites in the system that you can create accounts for.

Social pages are the pages which have been categorized as sites, pages, news articles, posts, images or videos for use in social bookmarking. Here is a the tutorial on how to add social pages.

There is actually more to this next box than it appears. If you have more than one LavaLinx account, (not social account), you can select which accounts you would like to use a particular social site on. For example, lets say you add Digg as a social site. You have it on your main account, but you don’t want it on your secondary account. This is where you would navigate to change that, and vice-versa; If you want to bookmark on a secondary account site, you will need to go to this page and link your social account with it.

Let’s add our first social account. Click on “Manage” or the number (currently zero)  on the Social Bookmark Accounts box.

You are now viewing a list of all social sites that we’ve added to our system. Currently, there are eighty-five, and this number is continually growing.

Select a social account to add, and click “New”.

If you don’t currently have a profile with the selected social site, you may click the “Setup a ___ account” which will take you directly to the page where you create your profile. When you are finished with profile setup, simply close the window and return to LavaLinx.

LavaLinx gives users the discretion of choosing what they would like to use a particular social account for. Even though some sites such as Myspace and Facebook are private automatically due to their setup (which will show up as N/A, without the option of a drop-down box), you may opt to make other profiles private if you would like to only bookmark your own material on them.

Now just enter your username and hit “Save”. Or if you prefer not to add that account, you may hit “Cancel”.

Remember when we talked about LavaLinx having the functionality allowing you to track multiple social accounts? After you add your initial account, you have the option to add another.

We’ll just keep ours at one. Now you can see that we’re finished adding this social account.

If you return to the Social Bookmarks page, you will now see that we have one social bookmarking account, and we have one of one social accounts linked with this LavaLinx account.

You’re all set up and ready to create trades.

Private bookmarking is a feature LavaLinx added for two reasons: One, it gives users the ability to bookmark their own pages if they desire to do so. The second, more important reason is due to the setup of the individual social sites. Some sites, such as Facebook, don’t give users a public account. This causes a problem with SEO and the link value of your bookmark, as the search engines are not able to view your account and therefore they cannot view your links. A different situation is where sites such as Twitter and Myspace change the URL of the hyperlink to a redirect or shortened URL, both of which negate the SEO value, and make it nearly impossible for those links to be verified.

To create a private bookmark, you will need to navigate to the social pages section.

Once there, select the page you would like to use, and hit “Bookmark”.

You are now on the page where you can bookmark your social page. Notice that the details on the social page are exactly what we entered in our Adding a Social Page Post.

To begin, click on the bookmarking hyperlink in the frame. This example is “Bookmark on Digg”.

This will then pull up the screen where you can bookmark the social page, all without leaving LavaLinx. (Keep in mind there are some social sites that require the bookmark to be made in a new tab. Whenever this is done, you will add the bookmark, close the tab and return to LavaLinx to mark the trade complete.)

The screenshot below shows how the social site will appear in LavaLinx.

Hit the button indicated on the site. For this one, it is “Digg”. For others it may simply be bookmark, vote, like, or save.

You will see now that your vote has been tallied.

The bookmark has been added.  Hit “Mark Complete” at the bottom right of the screen.

The next screen indicates that you are done bookmarking this page on the selected social site. You can continue bookmarking this page on whichever social site you prefer by clicking on the social site image.

If you return to the Social Pages section, LavaLinx will now show that you have one self bookmark done for this page.

You are now finished with the private bookmarking process! We hope this tutorial has been helpful for you.

In order to create social bookmarking exchanges through LavaLinx, you will need to first set up your social pages.

Let’s begin by navigating to the Social Pages section. (If you missed that tutorial, you can review the social page navigation instructions). Here is a screenshot of the page you will be viewing.

Click on the add button and you arrive on to the area where you will input your page data.

You’ll notice there are two sections on this page: Add Social Page and Link Information. Let’s take a look at each of these individually. Here we have the Add Social Page information box.

First is the “Name” field. It is important to keep in mind that this is NOT the name of the page you want bookmarked. That section is the “Title” which we will get to later. The “Name” field is for your own personal records, so you can easily track and manage different pages without the need to put in a full title.

You may have the Name and Title fields be the same, or different. That is all personal preference. The example we are going to use will use a different name.

Next, we move down to the URL. LavaLinx will pre-populate the URL based on which account you are in, so all you need to add is the last segment of the URL.

For example, instead of adding:

http://www.lavalinx.com/seo-links/easy-ways-to-gain-reliable-twitter-followers/

We simply add

seo-links/easy-ways-to-gain-reliable-twitter-followers/

The “Expiration Date” is a feature that we’ve added exclusively for those posts that may be time sensitive. You will want to use this feature on a holiday post for example, to make sure that users don’t bookmark this page past the time it is relevant for. To set an expiration date, simply click on the calender image and select the end date. When the time runs out, LavaLinx will automatically disable the page from receiving bookmarks.

For the page we are adding, the content isn’t time sensitive so we’ll just leave the expiration section blank.

The Status is where you select if you would like the page enabled or disabled for social bookmark trading. You can always come back to this page and modify the status at any time.

Tags are one of the most important items to add. These are the tags that users will add to their social accounts when bookmarking your page, so it is important that these tags be relevant.

Last, we have the Social Bookmark Type. Shown with a dropdown box, this feature is more complex than it appears. By selecting one of the options listed, you are giving our system the information it needs to know which sites will or won’t accept that article. This could keep you from being banned in social sites that might not accept that type of article. Here are the options you have to chose from.

Let’s choose Article/Blog Post as our social bookmark type.

Now, we have all of the first section filled out properly. Take a look for grammatical errors and add any information you may have left out.

You are now ready to move onto the next section. If you look below the Add Social Page section, you’ll see the Link Information segment.

There is a sentence above the Title. This is to remind you that the information you put for these fields will be the details that other people use to bookmark your page. The Title will become the hyperlink. One thing to note about the title is you want it to be viral. Try to write something that people will want to click on. If the original post title was boring, this is where you can change it up a bit and make it more interesting.  Questions seem to do well, but you can also use hints, put “quick tips” or anything denoting a list that people might be interested in.

Now, we’ll move onto the description. You will find more benefit from a short, intriguing description, than you would from a long informative one. Remember, you want the reader to click on and vote up your page, so it needs to look as appealing as possible. By not giving away all of your details, the reader will then have to go to your page if they want to know more.

You’ve now filled out the entire form. It should appear like this:

The last step is to hit the Add Page button at the bottom right of the screen.

You’re finished! Now you can go back into your list of social pages and your new page will show.

Congratulations, you have started your own Twitter account, and you’re ready to start putting yourself or your product out there. But how? You need to find a way to gain quick, reliable followers that will re-tweet and reply to your updates and help you get your name out there. You may have already followed everyone on the “Suggested Users” list, but don’t expect big users like Ashton Kutcher, Oprah Winfrey and CNN News to follow you back. You have to build your own empire, starting from the ground up. It would be wise and more beneficial to start with a smaller, more targeted group of Tweet users and go from there.

What you may not know is that you could already have an edge by simply having an online presence. Do you want to know the secret of quickly gaining at least ten followers? It’s nothing special, all you need is yourself, your computer, and online networking. You probably have a Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx or other social community account. These now come in handy, along with other social networking and micro blogging sites like Facebook, Plurk, Live Journal or your own personal blog. Try a simple post, a note, or an email to your contacts stating that you’ve joined Twitter and you’d like to follow them, and offer for them to follow you back. Usually follows work both ways and the prospective follower would like to get something back from their efforts. Also, if you know someone who doesn’t currently use Twitter, invite them to join!

The benefit beyond having your coworkers and friends following your Twitter account is that their friends are able to see your updates as well. Whenever someone re-tweets or replies to your update, it shows up on their feed, which in turn shows on the screens of whoever follows them. To give you some statistics for example, if you tweet something and have 20 followers, and just one of your followers retweet it, that is now showing up to your 20 followers, as well as however many followers the person had that retweeted. If they had 30, that is now 50 users that are able to view that one update you posted. Viral marketing in it’s finest.

Now that you’ve invited your contacts, the next step to gaining followers is to use the “Find People” option in Twitter and search for your targeted key words. You might search “SEO” for example, and get a list back of users with that name. Follow as many relevant users as you can. This is the crowd you want to be in, the people in your niche that will be genuinely interested in your updates. There is no purpose in following thousands of people if none of them are interested in what you are saying.

Be aware that getting followers is only half of the challenge. You have to have interesting updates to gain followers, and continue posting interesting content to keep them. There is also community management that shouldn’t be overlooked. Make your followers feel like you are interested in what they post by using re-tweets and commenting on their updates.

Some helpful twitter tips are to post about trending topics (commonly called “Hash Tags”, which are keywords with the number symbol (#) in front), post about an interesting article you may have seen, or a funny conversation. Stay away from updates such as “I’m going to bed”, “Hi everyone!”, and “I’m bored”. People like to see interesting stuff, and hearing about the beef burrito you just ate for lunch doesn’t really appeal to anyone. Happy Tweeting!

If you’d like to keep up to date with the latest Twitter trends and tips, feel free to Follow LavaLinx on Twitter.