Time-Saving Social Media Tools & Tips

Facebook & WordPress Collaborate: This week, Facebook introduced a social plug-in for use by WordPress bloggers. The Facebook for WordPress plug-in is receiving positive feedback for enabling bloggers to cross-post WordPress content to their Facebook Timeline and the Facebook Pages they manage. If your blog is based on WordPress, this new feature is good news for you! It is another great way to intertwine your content across your social media tools – broadening your reach, efficiently. 

How are you saving time?

I almost wrote “cross-pollenate” instead of “cross-post,” above! But really, that slip is not that far from the truth. If you spread your posts across social media tools, you will capture new followers who are connected for different reasons. If you can spread your posts across social media tools with less keystrokes, you just bought yourself time as well as exposure.

 
Clients have asked me whether they should choose Blogger or WordPress and I haven’t had a compelling case to choose one blog application over the other. I use Blogger, so I have been partial to that. But I have to admit that the advancements I have read about on the WordPress front make me a little jealous! I don’t consider Facebook the supreme judge of all things social, but their pick of WordPress for their new plug-in might be a (potentially temporary) leg up for WordPress in its survival-of-the-fittest race against Blogger. I fully expect Blogger to reciprocate. Sometimes Blogger will beat WordPress to the punch and, at other times, it will be reversed. That is what is called healthy competition. This time, WordPress got the head start.
 
Get further synchronized: If you are using Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, be sure to synchronize those three tools so that your posts on one tool are published to all of these tools. Another purchase of invaluable time.

 
Still adjusting to Facebook’s Timeline? Recently, HubSpot published a handy little (free) Guide to Facebook’s Business Page Timelines. It is a good resource for taking advantage of the new Facebook features which your business can use for marketing. It offers short explanations of:

• Six Facebook Timeline Features You Should Know
• Best Practices for Using Facebook Timeline
• Examples of Great Business Page Timelines

 
Get a handle on these features and concepts and you will be in a great position to better use Facebook Timeline for your business.
 
Keep an eye on your past: Don’t forget to analyze your own activity. Use analytics (from WordPress, Blogger, Google Analytics or through social sharing plug-ins such as Digg Digg or Shareaholic) to discover what is driving traffic to your blog, website, Google+ or Facebook Page. Try to identify what topics and/or keywords are drawing the larger crowds, as well as what falls flat. Stay in tune with trends in your industry and continue to blog about them. Your opinion is important to those who have chosen to follow you. Give them your creative perspective on your common interests and they may pass them to their circle of followers. 
 
Let me know if any of these new tools or tips helped you, and how!