If you’ve been reading my posts for a while you most likely already figured out by now that in order to quickly and naturally grow your network of friends/followers, it’s not enough to just sign up at twitter and facebook. You need to sign up and actively participate in many different social networks.
My advice is to start with 40 or so networks, and then continue adding additional networks each month. There are hundreds and hundreds of them. And many of them have their own clearly defined communities. So the more networks you’ll participate in, the better.
This way you’ll build your own network consisting of the accounts and pages of all the social networks you joined.
With time your audience will grow in each network, your accounts will begin to feed each other, thus providing exponential growth to your own network.
Of course, in order to encourage this growth, you need to provide fresh content to the members of all those networks.
Yet, you may argue, it’s humanly impossible to login to each of those networks each day in order to publish new information.
My answer – you’re right and you’re wrong at the same time. It’s impossible to do it manually, but it’s very easy to do with a little bit of knowledge about social networks’ apis , rss feeds and social aggregators.
You see, rss is the technology that lies behind all those api calls of social networks and it can make your social marketing life a lot easier.
If it sounds a little technical for you, don’t worry. I’ll make it simple. All you need to know that there are sites called social aggregators. They provide easy web interface for you to hook up to all other social networks from one place.
So instead of posting manually to hundreds of social networks, you just post in 1 place, and this information is “magically” published on all other networks.
All you need to do, is go to ping.fm, get there a list of social networks, sign up for them all, and then feed them through ping.fm
Another aggregator is friendfeed. While you use ping.fm to distribute your posts, you use friendfeed to actually aggregate all your posts in one place.
So if you post some info on twitter, some video on youtube, and some photos on flickr of facebook, you can combine all this info automatically in one feed, and then use it as a source for your blogs or other networks.
Another aggregator I would advise to use is Sokule. It’s somewhat similar to ping.fm, only for businesses. It’s still young and has many new features in development. Since its basic version is limited to 140 characters, I would advise you to use it for networks with status updates, while use ping.fm for blogging.
I mentioned only a few of the existing aggregators on purpose. If I’ll throw them all at you at once, I’ll just confuse you. Naming those 3, I provided enough info for you to get going and get your feet wet, yet not too much to get you into a stupor.
I hope this short explanation made it more clear for you how to use technology to simultaneously distribute content to multiple social networks.
Good luck!
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