An effective means of leveraging Social Media Networks is by combining them to reach different marketing segments. In a Small Business, this often means means frequently updating your company’s activities on several sites. Fortunately, there are several solutions than can make life easier.
I’ve got some suggestions for those who post to either just the major sites or to several social media sites including blogs.
Most business post updates to the big three of Social Media, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. All of these have tools to send your updates to the others automatically. It’s important to first assess which one you use the most. That’s important because you don’t want to use one tool that send auto-updates from Facebook to Twitter and another one that auto-updates Twitter to Facebook. That would result in some endless game of Tweet-Pong.
Posting Primarily from Twitter:
If you primarily post from Twitter, and want to auto post to your Facebook Fan page and your LinkedIn Page, you need to make these changes:
From your Facebook page use the Selective Twitter App. If you want tweets to go to Facebook, end the tweet with the tag #fb. Alternatively, you can install the Kipdola App.
If you want your Tweets to auto-post to LinkedIn, go to your LinkedIn page, then go to the top menu, select “more”, “get more applications” and select “Tweets” or click here:
Add your Twitter account to LinkedIn
Under the app settings, you can have all Tweets sent to LinkedIn as updates or selected ones that have the #in tag at the end.
So now you should be able to send tweets automatically to Facebook and LinkedIn.
Posting Primarily from Facebook:
If you prefer to post from Facebook, use the Twitter application in Facebook. It will prompt you to select a fan page from which to send updates as tweets.
Once you have to Facebook to Twitter connection, you setup LinkedIn to receive Tweets. Add your Twitter account to LinkedIn as above. Decide if you want them to be selective or not. If so, you have remember to add the #in tag in your original FaceBook update.
Posting Primarily from Linkedin:
On LinkedIn, Add your Twitter account to LinkedIn as above. On the home page you’ll see a Twitter checkmark. If checked updates go to Twitter.
Then setup the Selective Twitter App or the Kipdola App in Facebook. If you want tweets to go to Facebook, end the tweet with the tag #fb in your original LinkedIn update.
Try this cool feature that Twitter added to LilnkedIn. It lists all your contact in LinkedIn that have Twitter accounts and lets you easily follow them. You can also create a Twitter List of your LinkedIn contacts.
Even More Sweet, Sweet Linkage
Suppose you what to go beyond these three, and blast a message to several social networks and blogs at once. There are a few great tools for that too.
Posterous is a site that lets you update many social networking sites through email. Just send an email to “post@posterous.com”. The subject is the title of your post and in the body you can add either just a link or an entire HTML formatted blog post.
Just look for the auto-post options when you configure your Posterous site.
Then take a look at Ping.fm. What I like about this site is you can use an RSS feed as input and then blast to most of the major social sites. Most Websites and Blogs have RSS feeds, your post updates and news can be automatically sent out. You can also post from the site itself.
Lastly, visit Hootsuite. Hootsuite will let you post to multiple sites including Ping.fm. Using these these sites together means you can get your message out to even more networks. Hootsuite supports scheduled updates and some nice social media site analytics.
Summary
It’s important to be careful about how you combine these services to avoid multiple posts or cross-posts.
Not all social networks will be a good match for your small business, so don’t feel you have to post to all of them. Find out which mix of sites works best for your business and take advantage of these tools to engage with your customers.
If you have used any of these services to connect your business profiles, please comment below about your experience.