If you are using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks along with your blog and website you are probably feeling like the man in this picture – like the world is flying by you and you can’t keep up. If you haven’t already latched on to some of the applications that can help simplify the publication process, you’re probably publishing your blog and then linking to it manually from each of your social networks. What I’d like to do today is give you links to some applications that you can set up to automatically feed from one network to another. Before I get into that, let me share a few things that you should try to remember.
- If you set up one network to feed to another, that doesn’t mean that you never have to log into the second network. You need to stay engaged, but these feeds will help automate some of the most tedious work so you can focus on creating and maintaining relationships.
- There is some security risk in allowing applications to link because for many of these you will need to give username and password information. Be sure to do your research before allowing this link to exist. That being said, I’m not endorsing these applications as safe. I’ve compiled this list based on what I have used and what I know other friends use. So, while they appear to be safe for now there may be security issues down the road.
Facebook to Twitter Link
There is a Facebook application that will take your Facebook status messages and feed them to Twitter. You will notice that there isn’t a 140 character limit on Facebook so you’ll want to watch the length of your updates. This application will automatically truncate the post and provide a link if it’s too long for Twitter, but you don’t want your first 140 characters to be "I have something really, really cool to show you that I know you’re going to love, love, love" since that won’t have any meaning once it’s truncated.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn has built-in integration to Twitter and Facebook so that your status messages posted on LinkedIn will automatically feed to Twitter and Facebook. The great thing about this is that you can turn this feature on and off per post so you can control what is being fed to the other social networks.
LinkedIn also has applications to bring in your WordPress blog so that your posts will be visible on their site.
WordPress
For those of you who blog using WordPress, I would definitely suggest that you do a Google search for "Wordpress feeds to __"social network name"__". There are so many applications so it’s only a question of where you want to feed your blog. Facebook has an application called Networked Blogs. This application makes it so that you can feed your blogs to Facebook in addition to gaining followers of your blog connected to your Facebook profile.
Tweetdeck
This is an application you can try to balance several different social media networks. I haven’t tried this one, but it’s pretty popular and I’m sure you can find a friend using it who can give you good feedback and tips.
All in all, there are seemingly limitless possibilities when it comes to simplifying your social media presence. Whenever you do something regularly, ask yourself if there is a way to automate it. Do some research and ask around and I’m sure you will find many ways that you can speed the process so you can focus on the more important aspects of your branding – relationship building.
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Tags: 30 Days of Branding, Personal Branding, Social Media/Technology
