7 Reasons Why I Like Social Media As A Genealogy Tool

Blogs are part of social media. You are here so you are participating by default at worse case. I participate in social media for a few good reasons. Here are some:

1- I use Facebook and Twitter to share my findings with relatives. This is often a photo or a story. Connecting this way to relatives often provides feedback and collaboration. It also brings us closer together as many are quite distant in many meanings of the word.

2- I have over 1000 Twitter followers. Some are Craguns. When I post a Cragun article I forward it to Twitter. When I post a how to do genealogy article I do the same but for the purpose of trying to create some interest in genealogy.

There are buttons at the bottom of each article that is a one click forward to those sites.

3- Blogs are great as they are filled with content and the search engines treat them well. I am amazed where the visits to the blog come from.

4- You often can search Twitter and find a current tweet about a subject you are searching. This is the type of response you would get if you just did a Twitter search for genealogy:

5- Some great resources post to Twitter. For example Indiana Counties often Tweet about new records they publish online. You could pick any to follow.

6- I post some of my sources in Slideshare.net. I received an email telling me that my account was in the top 4% of their traffic. You can post power points and pdf' documents to Slideshare.

7- Blogs are a great way to start recording  your stories, as in chapters of a book.

The definition of social media should have something to do with being social. How's that for a concept?