2 May 2010

Integrate and automate your status updates


Since Social Media is time consuming, we need to search for ways to integrate and automate most of the daily processes we use for communicating with our network.

Recently I was interviewed by a journalist for Bizz Magazine, the leading business magazine in Belgium for startups and small businesses. The result of this interview you can find in this article (in dutch) : http://www.friends-with-benefits.eu/images/press/BIZZ105.pdf

I want to share a few essentials in this blogpost :

For each connection you make between networks, try to use the most simple way to connect. For example, LinkedIn and Twitter have integrated direct routes to each other's networks.
In Twitter you can use the hashtag #in to include a status-update on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn you only have to cross the box next to the blue Twitter 'T' to include a status-update on Twitter.

The most popular broadcast tools for status updates are Ping.fm, TweetDeck and HelloTXT

As a 'heavy' user of Ping.fm I still think the best feature is the ability to update all my networks with a simple email message ... a lot cheaper than updating through a webinterface when I'm abroad !

All three mentioned applications offer more or less the same features, only Tweetdeck delivers an application that can be installed on your pc and also gives you a dashboard view on your most popular networks.

When constructing the routes for your status messages to be send from one network to the next, always watch out not to create loops or multiple posting errors !
Each message should only appear ONCE on each network or otherwise this will annoy your visiters and followers !
Integrating and automating your status messages is also a part of the workshop 'Social Media for Business'.

4 comments:

  1. Very nice & usual stuff as usual my friend. Keep it up. Very interesting times ahead with this subject. Keep them coming!

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  2. Hi Geert,

    I liked what I read. I think integration and automation is the key to social media interaction and as you appropriately put it across. We are seeing more of the same from a host of companies and their products, and the networking sites. it saves time and repetition.

    However what I wonder is if people will eventually not like exactly that, because it is only human to want do different things in a different way, say something in better words, and sometimes even want to change a status message....for a different set of 'networkers' that people like to categorize. For example if I have one status update, I am not sure, Id like my professional colleagues at linkedIn to see the same thing as my friends in facebook (who could be a mix of personal and professioanl friends). It's just a though.

    Cheers,
    Rose.

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  3. @Rose : Even in Ping.fm you have the possibility to send updates to just a (group of) networks. This can be used to send different updates to different networks and still automate part of it !

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  4. Thank you for the info..I've never used Ping and will prolly now use it, it was not so well known in my country..but I'm sure it will be.

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