My Social Marketing Timesaver

I’ve written previously about Personal and Professional Branding. In my universe, the two are closely related. My hobbies are as much about business as my professional career is. Further, I find that my network gets the most value out of my status updates when they relate to interesting business topics rather than random and useless (in my opinion) rants. I enjoy marketing my business’ brand as an extension of my own and vice versa. For those that can relate to this counterintuitive insanity, I offer my preferred time-saving solution.

I have a personal blog and I contribute to a professional blog. Like many, I also have accounts on the popular networks like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter under my name. Luckily, there are some fantastic online and free tools out there to make your life easier and save you tons of time broadcasting. Assuming that you don’t want to separate personalities, here’s what to do to co-mingle your marketing:

- Create a Ping.fm account and link the networks that you want to post updates to. In my case, these are LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. If you’re not blogging and only updating status’, then this is all that you need.

- Create a Twitterfeed account and link your Ping.fm account to that. You’ll need your Ping.fm application key. Within your Twitterfeed account, add the RSS feed(s) that you would like to broadcast. In my case, these are the feeds from my personal and professional blogs. I also prefer to add a note to the beginning of my feeds based on where they come from. Thankfully, Twitterfeed gives you that ability. There are other settings such as post frequency, content, etc. that you can play with.

That’s it and here’s what my workflow looks like:

1) I Post an Article to Max Sobol : Brainwork blog or Start Philly blog.
2) Twitterfeed picks up the post from either source, summarizes it to a suitable micro-blogging format and posts it to Ping.fm.
3) Ping.fm posts it to LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter status’ with a destination link.

If you’re like me, it doesn’t get any easier than this once you have everything set up properly. Maybe there are other solutions out there but if your goal is to keep your personal and professional updates in sync, then this is your secret sauce.