Updating Multiple Social Networking Sites

Social Networking? Can be a life saver or a pain in the never region. Can take up a large portion of your day, and life. Can be a great business tool or a production black hole. Like most things, SN (Social Networks) can be good or bad. Depending how you use them.

I know of some people who spend up to three hours a day, updating their SN sites. Things like blogging, Facebook, twitter, plurk, flickr. This seems to escalate depending on how many SN sites you keep active.

When I first started out with my new Internet Business, website design and development, I added SEO to my stable. One of the things I learned quickly was that SN could drive traffic to your website. Help with building back links and help promote your website.

So what did I do? I started to join multiple Social Networks, including Facebook, twitter, plurk, linkedin etc. I also started blogging setting up multiple blogs. Some have similar content some are vastly different.

I soon found out that this took up a large amount of time. Having a new business I could not justify all the time spent on SN. I needed to bring in paying clients, I found it more profitable to spend time coding than Social Networking. But still realised the importance of SN.

I was in a bit of a dilemma. I knew that Social Networking could help me, but had no time to dedicate to it. As a result a lot of the SN sites were neglected. I only focused on the ones I thought might benefit me.

Enter in ping.fm. Ping.fm is a service that helps with updating multiple Social Network sites. By writing, or blogging in one place you can update everything. Their motto - "Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap".

Once you sign up, you add various services to your account that you want to update. They have many services in their stable and are adding more. Things like Blogger, LiveJournal, Wordpress, Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, LinkedIn. etc.

By writing in one place, ping.fm, you can post (ping) to all your SN sites. Updating your status, ,micro-blogging, full blogging. I am doing this right now. This blog was sent to multiple blog sites via ping.fm.

Whether it is advisable to send the same thing to multiple blogs is for another discussion.

With ping.fm you can ping (post) to all your Social Networks at once, or to a selected group, or to individual ones. This is done by triggers. These triggers help ping.fm to know what you are trying to do. For instance, you could just make status updates, or post to your micro-blogging sites like twitter and plurk, or even post to you full blogging sites like Blogger and Wordpress. You can ping them individually or as a group.

You can even create your own triggers, so that you can post to your own combination of SN sites. For example, you might want to only post an update to Twitter and plurk. Create a trigger, write your update, and ping using that trigger.

Ping.fm makes it even easier to update your sites by providing other services that you can use to update them. Services like Instant Messaging. Do you have AOL IM, or Live Messenger, or Yahoo Messenger. Set up a ping.fm contact using their application key, and then you can update your Social Networks through your IM client.

If that does not work for you, you can set up an e-mail to update you Social Networks. This I find will work great for those who are behind a company firewall and are prohibited to go to certain sites. With an e-mail you could possible circumvent this and update your Facebook or twitter via e-mail. Although I haven't tested this out, I see no reason why it should not work.

If you have tried this out. Leave a comment and let me know how it went.

What if you have been banned from the internet and e-mail. Well ping.fm have provided another way for you to update your SN sites. Through the use of your Mobile phone or iPhone, you can update all your SN sites. You can even SMS (text) your updates in, or send e-mails from your Mobile and iPhone.

All in all I am impressed with this service. It certainly has taken out the drag of updating SN sites. I recommend you take a look and let me know.

Leave me a comment, tell me what you think.