Friday, February 25, 2011

Working from Home: Automate Social Networking Updates

While most of our creative tasks require our personal attention and can be made faster only through careful planning of our activities, however the boring task of sharing links to your most recent blog post or web site article can be automated quite easily if RSS feeds are created.

RSS is a common tool which allows anyone to read a site's articles or a summary of articles and click through the feed link back to the original page on the site or blog. You fortunately don't need to learn how to create an RSS feed since all the major blog applications create RSS feeds for you. You don't have to do anything to them.

Automating posts to social networking and social media sites vary. You will either need to add the blog URL, blog RSS feed URL, or some other option in the social site to set it up.
Twitterfeed

An alternative that I prefer for both Facebook and Twitter is http://twitterfeed.com/. It only posts text links, but for anything except artwork posts that works fine.  Set up a Twitter account and your Facebook fan pages.

Join Twitterfeed. Add a new feed on their dashboard, select the options you want and it will automatically post a link to the most recent X entries for the period of time you select starting at thirty minutes.  You also have the option of having it use your bit.ly account for the shortened links so you can see how many clicks a link actually got!  I normally don't bother with that, but it is nice to know that I could look that information up.

For each feed you add to Twitterfeed, you can have it post to one or more twitter accounts and one or more Facebook pages (or your Facebook profile). Therefore if you have a Facebook Fan page about race cards and a blog about Nascar races and a twitter account, you could have both updated with your new blog post about Nascar without having to log in to each site and post links. It is great to be able to save time posting, and spend that time reading replies and commenting on friend's profiles and fan pages.

RSS Graffiti
For posting new artwork and graphic design to Facebook pages (or your Facebook profile) I recommend http://apps.facebook.com/rssgraffiti/ RSS Graffiti.  It is an app you add to your Facebook profile or Facebook Fan Pages and configure directly. If your RSS feed includes an image, it should get included in the update!  Since Twitterfeed doesn't include images I prefer RSS Graffili app for updates from my Zazzle feeds. Who wants to see a link to an artwork without a preview image?

There are other resources online for updating to Twitter and Facebook as well as other websites, but I couldn't get most of the others I tried to do anything!

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