Each Tuesday I will be posting social media tips and tricks. To start with I am focusing on RSS and Tags. I have often referred to RSS and Tags as "the Math equation you HAVE to learn to go any further in Social Media." Remember in school there was the one equation or formula you had to learn because everything else from that point firther relied on your understanding of it? RSS and Tags are the same thing. Your understanding of RSS and Tags will help you organize your content, share content on various sites, have selected content delivered to you, and enable your audience to get the content they want through the channel they want it.

RSS, RSS Readers, and Tags are “the math equation” a person needs to learn to go any further in the world of social media. The conversations within the social web are organized and discovered through the use of Tags. A simple definition of a Tag would be to say that tags are keywords, category names, or metadata. In essence, a tag is simply a freely chosen set of textual keywords which link related content together throughout a site, a network, and ever throughout the web.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds contain information from frequently updated websites that can be subscribed to using a RSS Reader (also known as an RSS Aggregator). By subscribing to RSS Feeds instead of email notifications, you can stay up to date on the latest news and other information from the web quickly and easily without visiting each site to check if they have been updated and without creating too much noise in your email inbox.

The feeds go into a single interface (RSS Reader), and can be sorted and scanned through quickly.

Tags are categories or metadata that users freely chose to describe their content. Almost all social media sites enable users to “tag” or categorize their content. Most sites enable the users to freely create the tags they would like to apply to their content. Each piece of content can be tagged with multiple categories.

Most of the time tags that have been used are displayed on a site. Tag clouds, as pictured above, is a growing trend on site. Tag clouds provide a visual description of the volume of conversation around a specific topic. The large the tag the higher the volume of conversation around that topic.

Tag usage is growing.

28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content

Taggers look like classic early adopters of technology. They are more likely to be under age 40, and have higher levels of education and income

The number of posts with tags or categories has grown past the 100 Million mark since Technorati began tracking tags in January of 2005

47% of daily blog posts that Technorati tracks (about 560,000 posts out of the 1.2 Million postings per day) have one or more tag or category associated with the post

Sources: Pew Internet “Tagging” Study – January 2007

By choosing the appropriate tag, not only can a user properly categorize their content, but they also optimize that content for various search engines.

Tags also link to other content with similar tags throughout the network sites as well as throughout the entire web. By being linked to relevant content, traffic to the site becomes more relevant thus increasing the “stickiness” of the site.

Below is a link to a great video by Common Craft, RSS in Plain English.

http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english

For more in-depth, hands on training, feel free to contact me at Sherry@ConceptHubInc.com