How to automate your social media.

03Jul09

The longer I do social media for a living, the more I look for ways to automate my process. Here are a few things I’ve found that you can do to make things a little easier on you.

1. Harness your RSS feeds

There are RSS feeds everywhere! Find ways to integrate them into all of your channels, try these to start out…

*Twitterfeed – Will take any RSS feed and tweet it out for you with a pre-determined intro (great place to put a hashtag if needed!) Also don’t forget to pull the RSS feed from your YouTube Channel & possibly your Flickr stream, depending on how often you upload, this is not something you want to have automated if you bulk upload!

* WordPress & LinkedIn – If you have a WordPress blog, you’re in luck! You can set it up so your blog is attached to your LinkedIn profile and all those perspective employers & colleagues can see what a genius you are.

2. Facebook does a lot of the work for you

* Notes – With notes you can actually import a blog’s RSS feed by just typing in the web address! Go to the notes page (this is something you would probably want to do for the public profile, but it works on personal profiles too) and there is a little box on the right hand side where you can enter ONE web address to automate to notes. Then whenever a new blog is posted, it will appear as a note. Check out AAPA’s PAProNow blog & the AAPA Public Profile.

* Social RSS – An application on Facebook that allows you to import multiple RSS feeds into the Facebook Public Profile wall tab. This I believe can also be put on the “Boxes” tab.

* Wall Settings – If you go to your personal profile “Wall” tab and click the “Settings” link, there you can import stories from Flickr, YouTube, Delicious, Pandora, Digg & a bunch more. This way whenever you update one of these sites it will automatically publish to your wall. Please Note – This ONLY works on personal profiles, NOT public profiles, so make sure someone visible in your org has these settings imported.

3. Go outside the networks

*Ping.fm – Instead of posting to each individual site, post using Ping.fm and cut your time in half. This site allows you to post to multiple social media/networking sites all at once. Remember to make sure that your content on each site you post to varies slightly, but is consistent.

Though automation makes life easier, it can also potentially spam your friends & followers, so be mindful of how often you post. Nothing beats being authentic, so make sure you don’t try to automate everything, leave some things unplanned, it’s what makes the content you send out special.

~Lynn

Filed under: RSS Feeds, Resources, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter   |  1 Comment
Tags: Automation, RSS Feeds, Twitterfeed