How I Wrassled Social Media to the Ground, Like a Rebellious Gator. Part 1.

Because I spend a lot of time online, I have tried virtually every kind of social media outlet available, and being the happy little extrovert that I am, I've made connections and friends on all of them. They all have their pros and cons and I like most of them for their own unique reasons, but there are only so many hours in the day and I don't have time to post indivdual, custom posts to every single one. Also, it turns out that my life, while a relative daily action-packed thrill-ride (read: not really), it isn't actually exciting enough for me to come up with original content for MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal, a blog, and myriad other services out there, so there has been a lot of redundant posting happening. 

Therein lay my dilemma. I have been seeking ways to consolidate. I set out to look for a mass posting service that would post to all of them at the same time - status updates to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter; blog posts to LiveJournal, my blog, and MySpace; pictures to Flickr and Picasa and my blogs; links to Twitter, Facebook and Delicious. I wanted one service that would do all of this automatically with little thought from me. I just want to email or text the updates, pictures and links to my phone and call it a day. Unfortunately, when I asked around, even my tech-savvy friends could offer little better solutions than "... um, have you tried magic?"

So here is how I finally managed to figure out how to post to everything all at the same time.

1.  I created a Posterous account.
Posterous is a free service that will post to a bunch of different social media and blogs for you. All you have to do is set up an account, tell it where you want it to post (Twitter, LiveJournal, Facebook), then send in an email to post@posterous.com. The body of the email will be the body of your post.

The problem is, if you make a longer blog post, it will simply post it as a post on your Posterous blog, and send a link to the Posterous blog over to Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, etc. And I don't actually want to have my blog hosted on Posterous.com, largely because I find the interface for customizing the layouts extremely awkward and difficult to play with. Note that this is a common complaint about Posterous. Its layouts really reek. A blog hosted on Posterous will be a fugly blog. Also, you can't post things like Amazon affiliate links or anything I MIGHT want the option of doing in the future on Posterous. I wanted my own domain name.

So, I wanted to be able to post on my LiveJournal and WordPress blog simultaneously, and I love the idea that Posterous will post everything in its right place - links to Delicious, upload videos to my Youtube, etc. - but when it posted links to my blog posts on Twitter and Facebook, I wanted it to link back to my actual blog.  

So I set up the service so that when I shoot post@posterous.com an email, it will post a blog post to my LiveJournal and my WordPress blog; any pictures contained therein will go to my Flickr, any links will go to my Delicious and any videos will go to my (as of right now empty) Youtube. How awesome is that?

BUT WAIT! THAT'S NOT ALL! [/BillyMays]

2. I created a TwitterFeed.
TwitterFeed is a free service that will post links to your blog posts to Twitter, Facebook and Ping.FM.  Since that's exactly what I need, I set it up so that my LifeIsFabulo.us posts get posted as links on Twitter and Facebook. I have an old PingFM account that will broadcast it out to all kinds of crazy places like MySpace and LinkedIn and StumbleUpon, too. I don't even visit those sites anymore, y'all, but, hey, I have accounts on them, so why not! Throw caution to the wind here, I'm posting all over the place now!

This system isn't perfect by any means. I've discovered, for example, that I MUST keep my Posterous blog open to the public, or it won't post to LJ and my other blog. I don't really want this blog at all, but until something better comes along - MAGIC!!!!? - I guess it'll have to do.

***

As people on LJ may have noticed, I've regrettably abandoned my LiveJournal for the last year, and it was almost entirely to do with time management purposes. I couldn't figure out how to keep up with the 95+ friends I have there, plus my 190 Twitter people, and 120+ Facebook people. It seemed too time consuming to repost to a bunch of different places, but it seems this problem has now been solved, on the posting side.

On the side of reading my friends pages, I'm still working on a way to read ALL the posts from Twitter, LiveJournal, Facebook, and the dozens of independent blogs I like to read all in one place.  I have an inkling of how I'm going to do that - though suggestions and other solutions are very welcome - but I think I've done enough for one day!

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