Resources

Connecting the Spokes on Your Social Wheel

By David Strom August 14th, 2012

If you use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and WordPress, they each have ways to automatically cross post to the other to save you time when you want to promote your work. Here’s some suggestions on how to set this all up.

I am assuming that you already have accounts on each of the services and that you intend to use them for your professional life. With my system, I have to first post something in WordPress. If you go under Settings/Shared, you will see this screen:

 

You can see a variety of services, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr and Yahoo, to connect to. For each service, you authorize WordPress to sign in to your account as you and post to the appropriate place (for Facebook you can post to your Wall or to particular Pages that you have set up, for example). It takes a few minutes to set up each account.

Once you post something new to your blog, within a few minutes you should see the shared posts on these other accounts.

What if you don’t want to start with WordPress? Then let’s go to LinkedIn, and under Settings you can see the link to your Twitter account here:

 

It is pretty much the same process: authorize the app to post on your behalf, and once it is setup your LinkedIn status updates are sent to your Twitter account and appear as tweets in a few minutes.

Another useful tool is Seesmic.com, which can post to a variety of social networks in a single pass. You select the services that you want to post on and it couldn’t be easier.

Of course, you want to make sure that you just set up one set of linkages from account to account, otherwise you could end up seeing multiple status updates in each social network. It might be helpful to draw a diagram showing what you have done, and saving this document in case you forget what you set up. But this can save you a lot of time when you are trying to get out the word of a new article that has been published.

Tags: , ,