Project Exposure: [1] Creating Social Media Presence and Cross-posting on Dev and Medium

In this blog, I continue my journey of increasing my exposure by designing my brand and making social media presence for my blog on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit. As well as cross-posting on other blogging platforms.

My brand

To make social media accounts, I need a brand. I am just going to call it "Chit's Programming Blog". Then I also need an email for all the social media, but I don't want to use my personal email or work email because I don't want to get my emails entangled. So I made a new Gmail account since it is the most trusted. Popular social media may blacklist other email providers because they are less secured and may be used to create spam bots etc.

Profile picture

I need a profile picture for social media. I don't want to use my photos, I'm also concerned about copyright and trademarks, so I cannot just snap an image online and use it. Therefore I need to design my own profile picture.

There are a handful of tools I can use. There are tools where I have to make everything from scratch, like Microsoft Paint, and Photoshop. There are also tools that give stock images and fonts for you, like Canva. There are also tools that claim to use AI to generate your logo if you tell it about what you want, like Tailor Brands, Designs AI, and Adobe Express.

I used Adobe Express since it is the bigger brand, and it says free to use forever on their website.

Social Media Presence

Then I created my social media page on different platforms.

Twitter

Once I created my basic Twitter account, I get to upgrade it into a Twitter Business Account, where I have to tell Twitter what company I am. Since there is no choice for content creator or blogger, I chose Information Technology Company. It also asks me if I am a shop or a creator, which I chose creator.

Then my Twitter account is finished. It gave me a handle "@BlogChit", which I am not so happy with, then I found out on their website that I can change the handle. I want the handle to be memorable and easy to type out. Looking at popular Twitter users, most of them use the same as their display name, so I think I will do that too.

But I discovered my name is too long, so at last, I decided to go with "ChitProgramming"

Instagram

At first, I thought I must use my real name on Instagram. But it turns out I can use my business name too, so I used it for searchability.

When I thought that I'm done making my Instagram account, I found a button to "Switch to professional account". I found this article talking about why should I switch to a professional account, and the point Instagram Business Profiles Can Share Links in Instagram Stories sold me, it means that I'll be able to share my blog post with a single click. So I clicked the button, selected "Creator" to describe me better than "Business", choose "Personal Blog" as my category, and then I have a professional Instagram account.

Facebook

This is basically the same with Instagram since it is owned by the same company, Meta. But one annoying thing is that it makes posts that I don't want. After I created the profile and added images, it made a post about my birthday, how I updated my profile picture and updated my cover photo.

Facebook seems to force you to use your real name to make an account, so I was confused why there are so many business pages on Facebook, it turns out that peoples use "profile", while businesses use "page", and "profile" to create "pages".

So I created indicating that my category is "Information Technology Company", added my blog's information, then it was done.

Reddit

Reddit is the easiest of all, I just have to select a username, and enter my blog's info. I don't have to set up a professional account or anything.

Cross-posting

I thought I had to make a program to automatically post my blog on other websites, then make a canonical link back to the original one. But turns out, that both Dev and Medium have features that help you publish articles from other sources.

Dev.To

Inside the Settings -> Extensions page, there is an option where I can publish to the Dev community from RSS.

I get my RSS on the upper right corner of my blog, then I paste it on Dev.

Then all my posts from Hashnode end up there, that's so cool and useful.

I have to add tags manually, I have to check what tags are trending on Dev. I check this on their tags page

Medium

As for Medium, I cross-post by going to Settings -> Stories -> Import a story.

Then I input the link to my article and click import.

This one gave me some extra spacing between lines, which I have to remove.

Medium doesn't share what tags are trending, it only recommended some topics, so I have to find out in a third-party website.

What's next

In this article, I created social media accounts and cross-posting accounts. Now I can share my blog posts on social media and engage in discussions. And I will cross-post my previous blog posts at a regular interval, to avoid being spammy. As for SEO, since it takes time for Google to index my blog posts, I think I'll have to wait, and post an update once I can find myself on Google.