Blogs, News Feeds and Social Networking

Every website needs to be promoted, and Zeald offer a number of ways to do this -  the Blogs & Social Networking Add-On helps you promote your products and services through social media.

• What is a Blog?
• What is social networking?
• Why should I take the social media plunge?
• How to put together a social media strategy

 

Blogs

A blog is a great way to publish news articles.  Also because it offers a so-called "RSS feed" your content can be shared in computer-readable form with other services and websites (eg online tools such as Google Reader or Bloglines, desktop applications like Outlook and services like Feedburner etc).

• What is RSS? Read more information or watch a short video (RSS in Plain English)

The blogging tool features:

• Your blogs integrate nicely into the frontend and backend of your Zeald website - a blog is just a component that you can put onto any page in live-edit.  It integrates with the sites breadcrumbs, page titles etc
• Users can post comments on each post
• Posts can optionally include the "add this" widget automatically
  
  
   
• Posts are automatically linked into your Sitemap and your XML Sitemap.
• Blog posts will appear in your website's search results
• The blog's atom feed can be viewed in a feed reader (eg Google Reader).  You can also use this feed with lots of other external tools - for instance tie it into Feedburner to give powerful features like reporting and the ability for users to signup to email digests (we do this on the What's New page of the help site for instance)
• You can easily link to a blog post: its embedded in the standard "insert link" popup in the rich text editor just like content pages and items are
• Tight integration with our social network product (more on that below)

Promote this

For users with our social networking addon : a new  "Promote this" section will appear on any blog post, item or content page in the website manager


This exists to allow you to quickly access the main promotional tools built into your website (including the new social networking features)
 

Social Networking

These days social networking is becoming an important marketing tool : Zeald and many of our clients already have facebook pages and twitter accounts.  As part of our social networking product we have created the ability to quickly broadcast messages to all your  social networking accounts (currently we support Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz). 

You can do this from the "Promote this" section while editing any Blog, Content Page or Item in the website manager

Your message automatically comes loaded with a link to the product, blog post or page you are editing.  You can insert "shortened" links (to save characters on twitter posts, where you are limited to 140 characters).  Select the social networks you want to post to and click "Post" - the message will be sent to all these social networks


After the message has been sent you have an opportunity to view your messages on social networks.
 

Social dashboard

Users of the social networking addon can view a feed of posts on all their social networks from the homepage of the website manager, which is handy as it saves you having to log into each social network seperately

 

Blog Menu and Blog Summary

On your Blog page, you are able to add components called 'Blog Menu' and 'Blog Summary.'

Blog menu is a blog navigation that allows users to browse by date or topic, and allows visitors to easily navigate your blog posts.

Blog summary allows you to show summaries for your blog posts, and gives you the ability to choose  the number of blog posts to summarize (default is 5 blog posts), well as the option of choosing to show a short summary of each blog and the number of characters to show

How to add a Blog Menu

To add a Blog Menu on your blog page,

1.Add a new component in Live Edit Mode called Blog Menu

2. Select options for your Blog Menu such as Name, Tag Title, Archive Title and click Save

3. Drag and drop your Blog Menu to an area you wish to display it

How to add a Blog Summary

1.Add a new component in Live Edit Mode called Blog Summary

2. Select options for your Blog Summary such as the number of posts to show, show summary of the post body, and if show post summary - how many characters to show and click Save

How to get the new Blogs and Social Networking addon

You can purchase this addon in the Zeald online store