Efficiently post to your social network

When I first started this blog, I thought about how to best put my content out there with the least amount of ‘posting’ on my part. In other words, I wanted to post something one time and have it zip along the social network wire to everywhere I wanted it…and I wanted it for free! Having no real guidance on this, I hit Google and after several hours of research, this is what I came up with. I hope it saves the rest of you some time and I would love to hear about any twists you would put on it ,or if you have your own completely different approach. There is really no definitive answer on how to solve this problem, only to do what you like best.

Step one was to determine where I wanted my content. There are two schools of thought here: 1) you want your content everywhere that you can put it and 2) be a little bit more selective. I am in the second camp. I want my content in several different places, but it doesn’t need to be on every blog platform, every multi media sharing site, every RSS feeder, etc. I narrowed it down to two blog platforms, one multimedia outlet, one feed and of course Twitter (a must). The base functions on all of the platforms I selected were indeed free, but I choose to enhance the feature set in two cases.

WordPress and Tumblr were the blog platforms I selected. I selected Tumblr because it has some really cool features like dialing a special number to leave a voice mail that automatically gets posted to your blog as an audio post. I also like the ‘tumble’ concept in Tumblr. I selected WordPress because I think it is the most mature blog platform and I found that it was already integrated with other platforms with which I wanted to integrate. WordPress serves as my main posting platform. I chose to pay an extra annual fee for hosting videos directly in WordPress.

For multimedia content, I chose
Flickr because it seems to be the most widely adopted and I like the Flickr Uploadr desktop application. I can also blog about my Flickr files on WordPress right from inside Flickr. I didn’t have to pay an extra fee for Flickr, but I wound up paying it to increase the upload size limitations. To me, this was well worth it for the time savings I got by avoiding the task of sorting through my pictures and videos to only upload some of them. It also allowed me to upload big chunks of media at a time.

I selected FeedBurner for my RSS ‘server’ or ‘feeder’ and I was really impressed with how many controls FeedBurner gave me to customize the look of my feeds.

Twitter and Facebook go without saying.

So then I needed to figure out how to reach all of these outlets with the least amount of effort. As rudimentary as it may be, I think this is best demonstrated with a picture:

Ping.fm is a nifty little site that will allow you to register social network accounts and post to all of the outlets you want to reach, and then some! With Ping.fm, I could consolidate into one website for all of my posting, great! In Ping, you can set up post ‘profiles’, so I set up two of them. One is for status updates and the other is for full posts. The status updates are sent to Twitter and Facebook and the posts go only to WordPress.

I used the Twitter widget on WordPress to display my most recent tweets in the side bar of my WordPress blog. I did this because I wanted to surface my tweets outside of twitter. The Ping post editor is not as robust as WordPress’, so I knew I would want to work directly in WordPress for longer posts and have it automatically ‘push’ from WordPress to Tumblr. Enter FeedBurner. I set up FeedBurner to pull from my WordPress blog and Flickr account. I then set up my Tumblr blog to only pull from FeedBurner; I will never have to post directly to Tumblr unless it is with that cool call-in feature I mentioned earlier. Every time I post to WordPress or Flickr, FeedBurner ‘feeds’ out to Tumblr, so Tumblr is an aggregate of all of my posts and pictures/videos.

It is important to link all of these sites together in one way or another which will help with Google rankings as well as help users navigate through your new social network web!