Social media has proved to be a great means for getting traffic to your blog: Once you have your web-presence, in the form of a social-circle on networks such as Twitter and Facebook, you can publicise your posts by this means in addition to socially interacting.

There are plugins that you can add to a WordPress blog, (I’m speaking from experience here.) that will aid you in doing this: They automatically send notifications of your articles to Twitter, Facebook, Ping.fm, and the like. You can also set these networks to notify other networks too.

There’s a single drawback there though, in that notifications are restricted to your own network alone. Whilst the faithful followers are notified, it can become somewhat of a cut-off clique in a sense of the phrase. Unless someone notices and retweets your tweet on Twitter, for instance, it’ll stay within your own personal following to a greater extent.

Having said all that; here’s a plugin that could get some great publicity for your WordPress blog posts. It’s called the Tweetmeme Button. It’s a plugin for WordPress that adds a retweet button to your blog, so that readers can retweet the main subject matter of your article on Twitter to their own social-circle.

From the plugin’s home page on wordpress.org: -

“The tweetmeme button easily allows your blog to be retweeted. The button also provides a current count of how many times your story has been retweeted throughout twitter.

Features

• Integrates the ability to retweet your post with one click
• Shows the current number of times your post has been retweeted on twitter
• Easily installed
• Allows you to specify when the button should go (e.g. top or bottom) “

From the button page on the tweetmeme.com website: -

“The Retweet button is for website and blog publishers that want to encourage their audience to retweet their content on twitter.

We have made our button really smart, with one simple piece of javascript we are clever enough to give you up to date tweet counts and shorten your title and link for the retweets. Best of all it will work on any web page, anywhere!”

Yes it’s not solely restricted to use with WordPress blogs. Any blog or otherwise can use it. The relevant code etc is available on this page linked here. The WordPress plugin itself will only work on WordPress, of course. Otherwise it’s a multi-platform sensation.

‘Pretty neat eh? – And I know that a number of probloggers are using it already. – So what are you waiting for? You gotta be in it to win it.

P.S. : Don’t forget to retweet this post.

Microblogging service Twitter used to allow users worldwide to update their status via free SMS from their mobile phones. In August of this year, 2008, the available 250 free SMS updates were withdrawn from European countries and Australia due to the greed of the mobile-phone companies causing Twitter to be unable to strike a reasonable-priced deal with them in order to subsidise these free SMS updates.

Three months later in November 2008 the same fate has befallen Canadian users, once again due to the greed of the service providers.

Writing for Venture Beat; M G Siegler expresses disgust at AT&T’s charging another $15 a month for conveying such a tiny amount of data.

Like Siegler; I don’t blame Twitter: it’s the greedy mobile operators that are slowly choking Twitter who should bear the brunt of any anger.

When India becomes Twitterless as far as mobile phones are concerned; will the US eventually follow suit and Twitter’s free SMS service be a thing of the past? Will this be a state-by-state shutdown or a nationwide outage? How will this affect the many Twittereers and Twitteresses in the USA who rely on SMS to tweet?