This article is an exploration of how multiple social media platforms can be bridged to optimize the time you spend on the web.

It looks at Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, Hootsuite, TweetDeck and Twhirl. It is designed to help you see how these tools can serve a Social Media Marketing Campaign.

Blogging is creating syndicated articles through a Blog Platform like WordPress.

Micro-Blogging is creating snippets, up to 120 characters in length, and syndicating them among a set of people following you, as in Twitter.

There are applications being built as we speak to integrate twitter with your blogs, with your facebook account, with your LinkedIn account, and with the rest of the quickly changing online landscape.

HootSuite is one of them. Watch this video for an introduction.

As you can see, HootSuite is FULL of functionality. It blows the mind and is hard to fathom at first. Lets take a deeper look.

A small quiz

  • what is a Sig?
  • Why do you need to know?

“Our business is about technology, yes. But it’s also about customer relationships,” says Michael Dell. The same is true with Twitter. Twitter is a technological breakthrough which hinges upon the creation of relationships. It works for Dell: they made $2 million off sales from Twitter. So how does a brand on Twitter establish relationships? One answer: sig your tweets.

“Sig” is a term borrowed from email culture, which is short for “signature.” Just as in email, sigs identify the human at the end of a message. A sig takes only three of a tweet’s 140 characters. Here’s an example:

Sigs are especially useful if multiple people tweet for a particular brand profile. They create organizational accountability and help manage workflow. A sig allows one to know who sent a tweet and when it was sent. Inclusion of sigs also values transparency, a high-value attribute on the Internet. Conversation becomes more natural when customers know who they’re talking to. reference page

Notice what one user said about sigs on the same site:

“I love the sigs – We have been using it for our company account for awhile…We like it because it identifies who is posting the tweets since we have several editors.”

So, the sigs will apparently allow a business to use a Twitter account as shared editors to have conversations that can help to manage projects and add transparency. When I set up my sig, I did find it limited to 2 characters, something may be outdated in Twitter’s video.

FriendFeed seems to offer the possibility of interfacing the content sharing functionality of various social media platforms, which could optimize the time of the social media user.

here is a video on what they can do: Welcome to FriendFeed

Twhirl is another.

Their homepage describes it as this:

“twhirl is a desktop client for social software such as Twitter, Friendfeed, identi.ca, or seesmic”

And Twhirl does provide the ability to update key sites as described on thier site: “cross-post your updates to Jaiku and many other sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and more via Ping.fm”

I was dissampointed with Twhirl because it did not seem to add anything special that the other applications were not offering. I moved on. It did, however, lead me to seek more info on Ping.fm.

So what is Ping.fm?

Ping.fm is a central interface for all of your cross platform posts. After learning how it functions, I set it up to cross post my status updates from twitter, linked in and facebook. I set it up to be my blog posting platform and to send my blogs to my wordpress account and my facebook notes.

Interesting.

And TweetDeck remains a solid desktop interface for sending messages accross multiple twitter accounts, although it might just be replaced by Hootsuite, which seems to offer far more functionality and may be able to do all of the things that TweetDeck does.

So, next in my research will be to get a better grasp on what hootsuite and ping.fm are capable of. More to come.

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