Sending Utot Downwind: Extending Reach Using Different Blogging Platforms

Just tweeting my status update.

A predator, as much as possible, avoids stalking its prey when the wind is blowing at its back, otherwise its scent will give it away.  But if you're a blogger, you probably would want to send your blog downwind to your intended audience. There are numerous ways to do that; one of which is using other blogging platforms to announce your most recent posts and thereby making your presence felt.


I've always put my blogs using Blogger a.k.a. Blogspot. It's the blogging platform that, once upon a time, pretty much spawned the entire blogging industry. I've dabbled a bit using Wordpress which has since surpassed Blogger among serious blogging enthusiasts and professionals. With the advent of social media, micro-blogging came into the picture and that just opened things up as a free-for-all for every Steve, Bill and Larrry to share everything from cat photos, food pictures, and viral memes to self-serving selfies and so on and so forth.

Now, as I try to get back into the blogging circuit and also help my son build his own corner of the Web, I realized I should try exploring these new blogging/sharing/posting platforms and see how it can be of benefit to a plain old traditional blogger like me.

Tumblr

The first platform I checked out was Tumblr. Last year Yahoo! acquired the blogging site to the tune of 1.1 billion dollars. There are analysts who say that Tumblr is the middle ground between Blogger and Wordpress. I say it's a quick and clean incarnation of the two but marries in by default a lot of what can be expected from a social media platform. 

There's a feed of posts from other "tumblogs" (quirky name but what the heck), you can like posts and follow other bloggers. And you can also hashtag everything, if that's what you fancy. It's an ideal platform for those who are just starting out in their blogging adventures yet it is sophisticated enough to meet the needs of the experienced blogger.

I built the Tumblr counterpart of Utot Atbp. over at http://utot-atbp.tumblr.com which henceforth will augment this main blog with updates and short posts. While others regard Tumblr as a micro-blogging platform, don't be misled -- it can carry itself well with full blog posts including images and videos.

Twitter

Over at Twitter, I've repurposed my old account into @utot_atbp which will now serve to further announce the entries in this main blog for anyone who cares to relish the ramblings of an old fart like me. Twitter, of course, was designed from the core to be an SMS (i.e. text messaging) compatible updates posting service. You can't post past the limit of 140 characters so you are forced to keep things short and sweet. 

Not much you can do with this one but if you are able to build a good following, tweeting your blog posts should bring in an appropriate audience to your main site. The upside -- in an increasingly mobile world, sending updates via your Twitter account does not require your followers to be in front of their desktop workstations. As long as they have tablets or smartphones and the relevant app, they will be alerted to your latest post.

There are loads of other sharing and micro-blogging sites out there and we'll explore those as well in future posts. For now, posting updates and reposting blog post links through Tumblr and Twitter should be enough to carry the scent of Utot Atbp. to my friends and followers in these alternative social network enabled blogging sites.