Do you have a presence on more than one social networking site? If so, you might be interested in learning how you can save some time by having your messages appear on all your sites without manually posting multiple times. Or would you you like to use multiple social websites for promoting your business but are reluctant to do so because you are afraid it would be too much to manage.
There are many ways to save time by integrating multiple social profiles. I only intend to discuss a few that have been helpful to me. I will focus on how multiple sites and services can be used together to accomplish your goals. I won't focus too much time on the technical details that can be researched at the help sections of the individual websites.
Let's consider a simple example. Suppose you have a Twitter account but want to branch out. Perhaps you feel your growth is limited by the Twitter policies regarding following. You would be happy to integrate another social networking site if you could do so easily.
A nice, easy choice would be to open a Friend Feed account. A lot of Twitterers also have FriendFeed accounts. There are good reasons for this. You can easily set up FriendFeed to update when you post to Twitter (and several other services too). Just go to the settings section and follow the direction for connecting to your Twitter account. (Make sure that your posts are coming from Twitter to Friendfeed and not the other way around.)
This is a great way to backup your tweets. If your Twitter account is ever banned or you lost your tweets due to some technical problem, then it would be nice to know that they are backed up on FriendFeed. You can easily build up a following on FriendFeed by following a reasonable number of people and then waiting for some of them to follow you back.
If you use the same profile picture and username, then this can help with your branding. Some people will likely recognize you and follow you on both sites. There is also the advantage of allowing people to find you by searching either site.
I realize that some of us like to do things in a big way and won't be satisfied with just two integrated social profiles. Well, you can definitely add more sites. It just takes a little more effort and patience. A casual user may not want to bother, but a more serious user might consider it an excellent return on their investment of time and energy.
Ping.fm is a great way to do this. Just open a free account and start adding sites. They have a long list of compatible sites. You can click on their links to open accounts at the supported sites and then connect them to your Ping.fm account. (Just don't do something like have FriendFeed connected to both Ping.fm and Twitter. You will get duplicate posts. Some other combinations can lead to nasty feedback loops.)
You can update your sites all at once from Ping.fm. If that works for you, then you have a powerful way of broadcasting your message. It doesn't work for me because I prefer to post to Twitter from either TweetDeck or a tweet scheduling program.
I found a workaround that works for me. I don't connect Twitter and FriendFeed to my Ping.fm account. Instead I allow FriendFeed to feed off my Twitter account and I burn a feed from FriendFeed. (I don't burn a feed from Twitter because I've had problems with my posts appearing correctly.)
FriendFeed has link at the bottom of your profile for the feed. I click on that and then copy the url. I then go to TwitterFeed.com and burn the feed. (Make sure that Post Link is unchecked because that will just add a link to the original post which is unnecessary for short tweets.) I would then connect the feed to Ping.fm (You do this at TwitterFeed.com) so it can update all your other sites. (This will require getting an authorisation code from Ping.fm. (So in review, a tweet to Twitter goes to FriendFeed and then through TwitterFeed.com to Ping.fm where it is broadcast to several other sites.)
This is what worked for me. It might not be the best solution for you, but at least you know what some of the options are. If you come up with an easier solution, I would love to hear about it.
