Most of you know that social media is a great way to promote yourself and make connections. If you don’t believe me I wrote a whole piece devoted to convincing the non-believers they should be using social media.
Even though Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are great tools for connecting and sharing, they take time. Not only is it hard to remember to share your blog posts on each platform, it’s time consuming to log in and out of the various networks. That’s where taking the time to link the various platforms can save you some serious time down the road.
Linking
There are a lot of applications that let you simultaneously post to various social media platforms at the same time. For instance you could log into Facebook, update your status and that same post would be sent to Twitter and LinkedIn. Additionally you can link your blog to Facebook and LinkedIn so that each time you publish a post it automatically gets shared.
There are pluses and minuses to linking individual accounts. If you have the same connections and audience on both Facebook and Twitter, your followers are going to get bored seeing the same things in both feeds. However if you’ve cultivated different followings this can be a great way to spread the word with little effort. I do urge you to think about your audiences carefully before you decide to link. If all this sounds like the best news you’ve ever heard, here’s some info on how to make it happen.
Through Twitter all you can do is put your Twitter feed on your website via a badge. If you’re interested in doing this here’s a tutorial that walks you through it.
Linking Twitter and your blog to Facebook is relatively easy. For a Facebook to Twitter link install this app and allow it access. Just a couple clicks and passwords and you’re set up.
Blog posts go through the notes app. To get to the right page to set it up is a bit of a treasure hunt so I’ll outline it for both your personal page and your business page.
Personal page – From your profile page, not your home page, you should see the notes link on the left under your photo. Click it and you’ll most likely get a page with excerpts of your notes. Click on any of the “view full note” links. Now in the left column, toward the bottom, you should see a link for edit import settings. This is where you import your blog. You’ll need the web address for your RSS feed. Go to your blog’s help section to locate it if you don’t know what it is. Facebook says you can import with just the blog url, but I have yet to see that work. If you can’t find your notes page at all, this should help.
Business page – The easiest way I’ve found to do this is to go to your business page and click on edit page. On the left side you should see a link for apps, click it and then you should see under added apps, notes. If you see “link to this tab”, click it, this will enable the application. Then go back and click “go to app”. If you don’t see “link to this tab” it’s already been added and you can go directly to “go to app.” Now in the left column, toward the bottom, you should see a link for edit import settings. This is where you import your blog. You’ll need the web address for your RSS feed. Go to your blog’s help section to locate it if you don’t know. Facebook says you can import with just the blog url, but I have yet to see that work.
This is probably the simplest connection to make. Under the settings menu you will see Twitter settings, go there to link your account and decide how much gets shown.
Then to link your blog to LinkedIn you go to edit your profile and scroll down till you see an applications section. There’s a link to add applications. There are a few choices here given what platform your blog is on, but BlogLink by TypePad seems to work pretty universally and if you’ve already put your web address in your profile you don’t need to do anything but add the app.
Now you should be linked all over the place. Your blog posts should get automatically posted and when you change your status to announce your next sale, it goes automatically to Twitter.
What apps do you use with Facebook and Twitter that help you keep in touch and save time?
I encourage comments directly to this post, but also feel free to email me directly with questions, reactions, struggles, etc. genevieve@lightboxsf.com
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