Social networking is a good thing to keep your site running smoothly. It also helps to pull in members that would not have found your site otherwise, and helps to keep the members you have updated.
Twitter:
Twitter is an ever growing option that many of your site’s members already use. You can utilize Twitter to get the word out on the better topics running on your forum, and can quickly give status updates to the site. It only takes a few moments to set up a twitter account, and only takes a minute to give an update!
ACP > vBulletin Options > Social Bookmarking Options > Add New Social Bookmarking Site
The input that’s needed is: http://twitter.com/home/?status={TITLE}%20{URL}
Then once you find a worthy thread, simply click on the Twitter Icon (You can easily find one for upload via Google Images) and the rest is pretty straight forward.
You can also log into Twitter itself to give tid-bits about your site. Warning people of upcoming down time (or worse, let people know of existing unexpected down time).
Facebook:
I know you already have a facebook account, these days everyone does! Now all you need is a page dedicated to your forum. Setting that up is not hard at all, just follow these simple instructions: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/help/?page=175 .
The input for social bookmarking is: http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u={URL}
The page can be a way to connect with your members on a deeper level then other bookmarking and social sites can never achieve. It allow your to not only give the best site updates, it allows for you to share banners and linking information, and when people “like” your page all of their friends and family see it! This can pull in other like minded people.
There are other great ways of integrating Facebook into your forum as well.
Adding a LIKE button:
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like
Put this on the main index to encourage people to share their ‘like’ of your forum. Once implemented watch the number rise…
Letting people see your forums Facebook Activity:
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/activity
Once that is added you can create a custom page for your forums to list it. If you are using vB then you follow the instructions found here: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=124749
The Activity feed will show who has linked or liked what on your forums. This will show which friends have done what, but is otherwise pretty anonymous, so it’s safe according to most privacy policies, but test this out before keeping it implemented to suit your own terms of use.
Del.icio.us.
Not many use this bookmaking site, and it’s not very good at keeping others up to date on the goings on of your forum, but it is a VERY handy site to help keep things organized on an administrative level. I use it to keep track of important threads on the various vB sites out there, such as how to add custom pages (as seen above), as well as the APIs of other sites (like the facebook links I just gave). Forum users can use it to keep track of important threads, so it’s really worthy of making sure they can use it.
The input for social bookmarking is: http://del.icio.us/post?url={URL}&title={TITLE}
Stumble Upon:
Over using this site will surely get your banned, so use it wisely… but also make sure your members can use it! This is a fun way to find new members and to get the word out to random strangers about interesting threads.
The input for social bookmarking is: http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url={URL}&title={TITLE}
Tags: bookmarks, Social Networking