Social Media Marketing Blog

With the rise in social media, it has given individuals multiple access points online. Facebook lets you be you and interact with all your friends. LinkedIn lets you be your professional self. Flickr shows the world what you love and what you love to do. But the resulting problem is the fact that you are disjointed. You are only you inside a particular network - not you as the individual person that you are. This idea works for some instances and yet at the same time hinder you in others. The answer though arrives in the form of vanity websites (it might not be the official term, but it is the one we are going to be running with).

What is a vanity website?

A vanity website is basically a place online that aggregates all your information and your social bios into one place online. Designers and other web savy people social media were doing this a long time ago - buying their own name domain and pointing links to their work or just placing their CV and portfolio on it.

It was out of the mainstream however due to the skill of having to build it from scratch and making it unique from everyone else (you can be you with a default set of templates). The other reason why they were never extremely popular is the fact that the average joe or executive did not have a presence online. But with this “fad” of social media not disappearing and the fact that most of the major networks rank extremely highly for peoples own names, it has almost forced us to take our online reputation seriously.

So how do I set a vanity site up?

There are a few services out there currently that can not only give you the infrastructure that you need, but integrate with all over the major social networks. These are:

• Card.ly - This is probably the one with the best traction at the moment allowing a bio page, links to all your networks, complete contact information storage and streaming from your participating networks. There is a wide variety of custom themes but unfortunately no support for completely custom. Signing up for a paid membership however does give a greater ability for customisation and even gives you a fully-followed link out of it.
• Flavors.me - doing almost the same as cardly but with what I think are better templates and also the fact that you can submit some definite personal touches such as a custom background images (a la Twitter) and integration with a smaller number of networks (Last.fm, Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, Tumblr). However the overall look is very arthouse, trendy, designer friendly, which I am sure will appeal to the more fashion conscious. The only downside is that it doesn’t appear to be accepting many members at the moment and also appears to be a paid only service.
• DIY - By going DIY you buy your own domain address and can use your skills (no matter how limited, to build your own vanity website. Take 5 minutes just to install a Wordpress blog and not only can you combine all your services into a page, but you can also have a fully functioning blog which you can actively use for a week or two and neglect - as per the vast majority of the online population. As long as your homepage is static like and accepting feeds from your social networks then you can hide the blog in the back until you are a bit more disciplined.

Do I really need one though?

Well this really depends on how important it is for people to find you online? By having an exact domain match for your own name which then links out to your chosen networks (you can control the flow) then you can maybe hide some of the things you get up to (I’m thinking of your Facebook) and only give people the full perception that you want them to have. None of the other networks will outrank an exact domain match for you. It’s almost a certainty.

So for those that are on every network known to man, and want to have that one stop shop for them, vanity website is definitely for you.