Manage All of Your Social Networks With One Tool!

As a business owner, keeping up with every available social networking site can be daunting.  Potential customers are anywhere and everywhere and of course wherever your customers are, you need to be!  Is it really necessary to build and maintain a presence on every social media site?  Probably not, but even maintaining a presence on several social networking sites can cost more time than you have. 

With Facebook’s user base of 200 million daily users and Twitter’s user base growing at an amazing rate, social marketing is here to stay. In order to manage your time more effectively, tools like Ping.fm allow you to cut out the middle man and update all of your social media sites with just one post.

Logging into Twitter to post a message then logging into Facebook, LinkedIn or FriendFeed to post the same exact message is not really an effective or efficient use of your time.  Ping.FM allows you to do it with just one log in, one email, one instant message or through a phone app!

Ping.fm will aggregate to over 30 sites and growing. If you have a customer base or leads on YouAre or Plurk (I’ve never heard of them either) get started. Photographers can post their pics to Flickr, while updating their portfolio on their Facebook fan page and LinkedIn.

Users can create groups so that messages can be sent to some of your social networks and not others. You can send updates to only your micro-blogs or only your instant messages. Videos and music can be streamed which make the possibilities and combinations endless. Ping.fm will even shrink those long URLs when posting to your micro-blogging sites like Twitter.

Ping.fm is a great tool, however keep in mind that it is only a tool and will not perform the relationship building social media requires. Basically, the downside is that ping.fm will take the social out of “Social Networking” if you abuse it. In essence, you are just broadcasting messages to your network. You have to remember to actually engage your community from time to time no matter which Social Media medium you decide to use. Another downside is that your networks will eventually recognize that you are not socializing and may be using a tool.

It sounds too good to be true but Ping.fm does make life a little easier because it allows posting to multiple sites in one step which will also let you increase the frequency at which you post. Like anything you must remember to engage your followers and friends to build your community.