There are two sides to the argument of whether or not you should automate your social media presence. To be clear, I’m talking about automating the syndication of your content through to multiple social accounts – I don’t condone automation tools that auto-direct message individuals or automatically try to add friends to your account. (Although those tools have their uses)
This article assumes that you recognize the benefits of social media but don’t have the time in your day to dedicate to the constant checking, posting, re-checking required to really make the most of social media tools. Cutting down that time and focusing on the basics of social promotion, by automating the syndication of your content, will allow you to focus your time on the creation of more valuable content and/or relationship building via social tools.
Ideally you’re running modern blog software (WordPress) on your website which allows for the syndication of your content via RSS feeds.
To find the RSS feed on your website, navigate to your blog’s homepage, view the source of the page and look for a line like this:
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” href=”http://www.YOURWEBSITE.com/feed/” />
Alternatively, you can follow the directions here.
I’ve used http://ping.fm in the past but recently discovered http://dlvr.it/ which offers more options and a slicker UI.
Step 3) Add your feed and choose your destination
Paste the RSS feed address you copied from step 1 into the tool then select an icon of the social media tool you want to get started with.
Follow the instructions to provide dlvr.it with access to your first social media profile. (Don’t worry, you’ll be able to add more profiles in just a second.,)
The standard method of setting this up will involve a single RSS feed on the left (Sources) and a handful of accounts on the right (Destinations)
You can setup destinations for:
There’s even an RSS destination option which gives you the ability to take a handful of sources, process them, and combine then into a single RSS feed to be used elsewhere.
Make sure your delivery is set to “active” otherwise nothing will happen.
Give it a week and then log back into dlvr.it, click on the Stats tab and monitor changes in your audience as well as click-throughs on the links the system is posting to your account.
Once you’ve got the basics covered, I’d recommend playing around with some of the unique features this service offers.
You can have the service add Google Analytics tracking parameters to the URLS the software posts for simplified segmenting within Google Analytics.
Automatically replace instances of keywords with hash-tag versions. This is very powerful as it allows you to extend the reach of your posts by having them show up for popular hash-tag searches. I highly recommend you don’t overdue this as it could destroy the readability of your posts.
You’ve now automated the syndication of your blog posts to all of your social accounts.
Wind-up bird photo source: http://www.etsy.com/listing/34437041/vintage-wind-up-bird-toy-luli-western