Connecting social media

To continue with the topic of my latest blog post about the tool Social Submitter, I want to talk this time about how to post content to different social media channels on a efficient way.

We all know that there are really a lot of social networks available on the internet. The question of today is:”How do I enlarge my social media reach on the most efficient (time and effect) way.” I had a look at 2 tools that should make people “more social”: Ping.fm and Hootsuite.

Ping.fm, supports a lot of networks

According to themselves, “Ping.fm is a simple and FREE service that makes updating your social networks a snap!”. To be a little bit more informative, I would say that Ping.fm is a service that makes updating the same content to different social media channels easy, because it allows the user to post status updates/blogposts/photos/links to multiple channels at the same time. On the photo are Facebook and Twitter missing. The reason of this is because I already added my accounts, so Ping.fm removes them then from the “add network” list.

You have to register 1 time to use Ping.fm, and for every social network you want to post to, you should have of course an account. Once set up, it is very easy to use. You create a group (you can choose between status updates, blogging, microblogging and photo posting). Then you add social media channels to the group and post content to the group. 1 piece of content will be send then to all of the channels in the group.

Hootsuite, post, receive ánd track

Hootsuite is also a browser based app that has the same functionality build in. Hootsuite supports less different social media channels, but it has more functionality than Ping.fm. Hootsuite does not allow you to create groups, but you can send a status update to multiple accounts at the same time. Instead of just posting content, you can also monitor your Facebook wall, Twitter stream or Twitter search. This works with columns that are placed next to each other, and I have to say that it looks very conveniently arranged.

Another great feature of Hootsuite is that it allows you to import Google analytics, so you can compare for example sent Tweets (from Hootsuite app) with the amount of views on a website. This way you can see what kind of effect the Tweets has, and estimate the amount of views it generated.

Is there a better one

If we look at these to apps, it’s obvious that they have both their advantages. Ping.fm supports a lot of different social media networks, and allows the user to put these networks in groups to create overview, while Hootsuite gives the user the opportunity to actually see what is going on in the different social media networks.

The ideal program would be a combination between these to apps. All the networks plus grouping from Ping.fm and the overview and streams from Hootsuite.

What about the social news websites

Websites like Digg or Reddit are not supported by the 2 mentioned apps. Is there a way to automate for example new blog post links? Yes there is. If you have good and informative blog posts that you want to share as “news”, you could import the RSS feed into these websites. Everytime you post something new, it will be also shown here.

Conclusion

I created a quick overview about the different popular social media from today, and they can be connected to each other.

According to this scheme, Twitter, Facebook, a Blog and Youtube should be taken care of manually. All the other ones can get their content or from RSS feed or from posting from Ping.fm. Facebook can have profit of the other networks by letting them post their content automatic to the Facebook wall. Hootsuite could be used to monitor these important channels.

For my blog it means that I create blog posts in WordPress, use the RSS to get the links in the social news websites and get the blog posts automatic posted on the Facebook wall (coming soon). Twitter is used separately. Linkedin, Google Buzz and Facebook will show my Twitter stream, and I will use Ping.fm to provide the rest of the channels with content.