A blog should be considered the central hub of your social networking universe. Everything you do should drive traffic back to your blog, or website, as a way of combining all your efforts to give your brand maximum exposure.
Once thing you can do to help populate your social networks would be to update your status with your blog posts when new content is published.
By no means is auto-populating a service like Twitter going to get good results on its own, but as one piece of a social networking strategy, it can help a network grow.
Here are just a few of the many ways you can automatically syndicate a blog post to social networks.
TwitterFeed
TwitterFeed is quite possibly the best way to syndicate content. TwitterFeed can update Twitter, Facebook, Ping.fm, HelloTXT and Laconica. It also integrates URL shortening services, hash tags and keyword filters.
Ping.fm and HelloTXT
By default, Ping.fm and HelloTXT need someone to manually send out updates, but when integrated with TwitterFeed, you can auto post blog posts across the social web. Ping.fm and HelloTXT include nearly all social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ning, Tumblr, Posterous, Flickr, Yammer and many more.
FeedBurner
If you’ve already got FeedBurner setup, you can add your Twitter information and have it auto update your Twitter stream every time FeedBurner finds a new story.
HootSuite
HootSuite is a web based social networking aggregator. You can add in one, or more, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, Facebook pages, WordPress.com sites and even Ping.fm accounts and manage them all in one location. You can then manually update multiple accounts at once, or add your feed, select your accounts, and have it auto-populate your social networks.
RSS Graffiti
RSS Graffiti is the easiest way to update your Facebook, and Facebook Page, status with your latest blog posts. It takes the post title, a short snippet, and an image from the post and updates your status.
All the services noted above are free and work with any site that has an RSS feed.
Please keep in mind that automating a social networking account doesn’t provide quality to the people you are connected to. However, automated updates from your blog, mixed in with normal conversation and networking is a good way to help drive traffic back to your blog.
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About Lee Odden
Nice article, similar to what I’ve been saying for a couple of years. While updating the “Social Media Syndication” flowchart I created some years ago I realized the power which syndication could have when combined with curation, in this way there’s an added advantage that the knowledge you are creating can be combined with the information others are producing to add even more value to your readers or customers.
Good