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Social Networking Experiment

Anyone who has started the process of marketing themselves online would have heard someone use the phrase ‘social networking.’ Social networking has become such a large part of internet marketing because the general trend of internet users has been to move from a research focus to a social media management focus online.

Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Plurk, Flickr, Youtube and many other social network platforms are available, but which one should we focus on. Lets be serious, most business owners don’t have the time to network across more than one social platform. The benefit of networking across multiple platforms is that each platform has its own group of loyal fans. These fans may also have other profiles on other networks but they prefer to operate in one specific network. They know and understand this network and more importantly they have fun in their chosen network. A person is more open and approachable in an environment they enjoy than in one they don’t enjoy.

Spreading your social networks will help you find people in an environment they choose and in that place you will have the opportunity to network efficiently and effectively.

The Good News

I have done an experiment and the end result has been very beneficial. Saving me time and increasing my back-linking to my websites and more importantly driving traffic to my websites.

The concept is simple: find a way to update multiple social network platforms from one place.

Here is how it works:

1) Visit www.ping.fm

Ping.fm is a social linking platform. Open an account for free and then load the social networks that you use to your account. Ping.fm has made this a very easy thing to do with a very simple ‘add more networks’ button on your ‘dashboard’ page.

Now you can update you status and your blog in ping.fm and it will update all your social networks for you.

I have done this with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress and BlogSpot. Each of these accounts are updated regularly now and I have already experienced a 12% increase in traffic to my website from twitter (within two weeks). And now with every update I make five updates, getting my message out faster and more effectively.

For the more advanced

Only go further if you know what an RSS Feed is.

I decided that I didn’t want to use ping.fm as my updating platform but that instead I preferred to work with facebook in my status updating and then wordpress in my blog updating. Facebook is my social network of choice, where I feel most comfortable so naturally I spend most of my time there. To add another destination to my social networking experience would defeat the object of the exercise. I also enjoy the wordpress interface and feel comfortable there, so I wanted to run my blogging updates from there.

Twitterfeed solved this for me. The interface is not very simple but the technology works well. Basically Twitter feed can send updates to your ping.fm account and then ping.fm updates all the relevant networks.

Here is the process:

Setting up Facebook as your update source:

1) Open a twitterfeed account (they use OpenID which means you can use your gmail login details)
2) Find the facebook mini (status) rss feed – this article found on Internet Duct Tape really helps in this regard
3) Load the mini feed from facebook to your twitterfeed account, making sure that you have selected the ping.fm option (as you can also send feeds to twitter and id.ent.i.ca
4) Make sure that you are not sending update to your facebook account via ping.fm as this will create an ‘infinite loop’ of updates

Now when you update your facebook status, the status on your other accounts will be updated.

Setting up WordPress as you blog update source:

1) Get the RSS feed from your wordpress blog
2) Load the wordpress feed into your twitterfeed account
3) Make sure that you are not sending updates via ping.fm to wordpress as this will create another ‘infinite loop’ of blog posts

Any blogs (like blogspot) that are updated by ping.fm will be updated by when you update your wordpress blog.

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