How findable are you?

How findable are you?  I am currently cross-referencing people I met from unSem chat to find at facebook.  And sometimes, just by name, I get a result of 300 matches.  If you have a unique name, it’s better, and also if we’re already part of the same circle, I can easily see that we have 30 friends in common so you must be the right you!

Then I question – do you want to be found?  And I must keep in mind that not everyone is a shameless self promoter and online junkie like me.  Using a consistent picture helps, embarrassingly I found myself on MSN with a super duper old pic I used to use from my TGN days, which I set up in oh let’s guess 2000.  So old I do not even have a copy of that picture on my current computer.

My moniker helps significantly – google funDiva as one word and I am 9 of the top 10 results, about 85% of the top 100, fun diva as two words, no quotes, nothing in top 100, “fun diva” with the quotes, 1 of 20, fun diva christy, no quotes, nada, “fun diva christy” with the quotes, only 3 results total, all me.

Christy Hoffman, no quotes, 6 of top ten, “Christy Hoffman” with the quotes, 6 of 10 again, “christy hoffman” las vegas, 9 of 10, OK that’s enough, are ya bored yet?  Of course these will all improve when I get around to moving my blog to self-hosted WP and I doink my META tags

Making yourself more findable at facebook

The nice little hack for facebook is listing the words funDiva as part of the profile fields.  I first listed my profile name as “funDiva Christy Hoffman” which facebook kiboshed when I wrote to customer service.  Stupid facebook.  But under employment, I put funDiva.com, and listed my job title as fun Diva, so either fundiva or fun diva will go right to my results.  I also changed my profile pic to write funDiva in text.  I do have a retarded fan page that is listed as funDiva Christy Hoffman, but I look so lonely with a whopping 15 fans!

So go there now and be a fan – http://fan.funDiva.com

What?  We’re not even friends yet at facebook?  How so?  OK go here for my personal profile – http://fb.funDiva.com

(Also note that I made my own facebook shortcut using a subdomain redirect INSTEAD of using the profile.to application.  I reasoned that if profile.to ever goes out of business I will not want some weird results that I can’t control.  I was inspired to do this after seeing Simon Leung’s pretty redirect – http://www.simonleung.com/facebook

I am still so lazy I haven’t changed my hosting over from just using my subdomain redirects thru my registrar, to my real hosting accounts.  There’s a lot of details there and I want it to be pretty when I make the switch.

Making yourself more findable at twitter

OK on to the twitter hacks – make sure your name is TWO words and preferably not just your username repeated – if I search, umm let’s see who I can pick on, Paul McIntosh, I get some random guy in the UK who is not my Canadian SEO wizard friend.  Luckily I know his twitter username is @pmctosh http://twitter.com/pmctosh

And for goodness sake, list a web site if you have one, when I see a new person following me, and I don’t recognize them from another source, I always visit their site to get to their about me to see if I think they are worthy of me refollowing.  If ya wanna get fancy, make a “Why follow me on twitter” blog post and link right to that.

pat o’bryan – no results – patobryan – two results GOOD GRAVY Pat – fix that unused PortableEmpire twitter already!  182 people want to hear from you (ok theres prob lots of repeats) – do something like this:  http://twitter.com/ChristyHoffman

And one final rant – use ProPer Case SenSiTivity – twitter is case INsensitive, however the username funDivaChristy is much easier on the eyes than fundivachristy.

Case in point:  http://mypenisfun.com

Go There Now!  Trust me it’s worth it!

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