How to Automate and Manage Multiple Social Networking Sites

One of the challenges some face with social media is the time it takes to manage multiple sites, blogs and listings. The time it takes to manage a social media portfolio could easily make your social media presence become a victim of the time constraints we need to deal with on an everyday basis. I get asked a lot “How do I stay active on multiple social networking sites and still have a life?” If I can tell you how to automate and update your entire social network profiles simultaneously from one platform, would you believe me? Of course, you would!

Here are a few tips I found and are currently using on an almost daily basis to automate my social media activities:

Twitterfeed
Twitterfeed is a simple publishing tool, which turns any RSS feed into a Twitter and Facebook stream. As soon as you have published your blog, your post will automatically post on Twitter and Facebook with the headline story and a shortened link.

Twitterfeed now also includes a basic analytics dashboard. You can see how much traffic is coming to your site and how many clicks per Twitter or Facebook. I try to get in the habit to compare my Twitterfeed stats with my Google Feedburner stats, to see where most of my readers are coming from and which platform I need to target more or less and I adjust accordingly.

Seesmic
Seesmic is Adobe AIR desktop application, which integrates both Twitter and Facebook, but more on the visual effect. This all-in-one tool makes it easy to reply to your friends, share links, photos and videos in one screen. Some of the features I enjoyed the most are the capability to have multiple accounts and columns. I can view my Twitter friends, my Faceboook friends, my Corporate Cosmo fans and other fan pages I want to stay tuned into. Of course, I am a Blackberry fanatic, so Seesmic is also available on my Blackberry.

TweetDeck
TweetDeck is another Adobe AIR desktop application for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. TweetDeck has the same features as Seesmic except for the geolocation aspect. This feature allows your friends to tagged their Tweets by location, so you can instantly see where that coffee shop they’re talking about is. A little scary, but it may serve some purposes. Businesses typically use this feature when they are running “Tweet Specials” i.e. specials that are targeted in their social media campaigns. Let’s say you owned a restaurant and you have some Monk Fish that is going to go bad. Put it on special and Tweet it out! It works!

Ping.fm
Ping.fm is a free social networking and micro-blogging web service that enables users to post to multiple social networks simultaneously. This service allows you to update your status only once to almost 40+ social networking sites, blogs and micro-blogs. Ping.fm groups services into three categories – status updates, blogs, and micro-blogs – and updates can be sent to each group separately.

Although, I would not solely rely on Ping.FM to shorten a link that I post, I do use budurl for my link shortening (due to analytic capabilities), cut and paste the story headline and post.

Please be mindful of how often you post. Automation can make your life easier, but it can also potentially spam your followers. Try not to use every automated service you can find. The majority of these services have the same features on posting to the same social network profiles, but repetitive posting can be annoying to others especially when relevance is an issue. Sending out 40 posts or Tweets about how you are on your way to Aunt Tillie’s for dinner is not something your followers need to know.

Thanks again for reading this week’s post. Don’t forget to tune in to our next radio show on Blog Talk Radio on Thursday, January 14 at 8:00 PM EST.

Have a Cosmopolitan Day!

Nan Ross
Social Media Diva