It’s time to decide on your social media “flow”

So what does that mean, exactly? I coach my clients to sit down and really think out how they want their blog content to “flow” out into the social media world – where does it start, where does it go next, how are all the sites connected, etc.

One big reason is that as social media evolves, and as you start to join (and sometimes abandon) more sites (linking up your blog to everything, just like you should), you may find that items are double posting in some spots. Or worse, not posting at all on others.

As an example, when I post content onto my blog, I use www.twitterfeed.com to send it automatically to Twitter. From there, the TweetSync app on Facebook picks it up and posts it onto my Facebook profile. I haven’t done a single thing except hit “Publish” on my blog, and it’s now on my main social media presences immediately.

There are many advantages to taking a few minutes to sit down and examine your current “flow”, and figure out ways to streamline, improve or reduce volume in different spots:

• You may have forgotten that you linked a site to your blog way back when – for example, most people on Facebook start off by adding their blog feed to the “Notes” section in order to have it post automatically. However, if they then join Twitter and set up some automation for their tweets to hit their Facebook profile, then they could have double posting issues.
• You may have unlinked something because you were using another service, but then stopped using that site or service, and forgot to hook things back up
• Finally, and this is a big one for social media time management, you may not realize how inefficient your current set up is. If you find yourself hitting “Publish” then visiting several other sites to post the link to your new blog post, there are certainly ways to save yourself those few minutes

So how do you get started?

Sometimes, the best way is to write a new blog post (heck, it can be a simple “Tip of the Day” thing, nothing too in depth), and without doing anything else, watch over the next few hours to see how it “flow’s” onto your social media profiles.

On Facebook and Twitter (and some other services), you will usually see a note in small text on where the post came from:

This should give you a pretty good idea of what services you have hooked up. (Something posting, and you just can’t find it? Check which applications you have installed on Facebook, and take a look at Settings –>Connections on your Twitter account to see which services you’ve allowed access, and revoke access to any unnecessary ones)

Then, think about where you spend the most time, and where you would like to start with content (including tweets and status updates not from your blog that you would still like on multiple sites).

So if you want to start at Twitter, use a service like Twitterfeed.com to feed your blog onto Twitter, then connect an app like TweetSync (2/10 update: now called Yakket) to pull those tweets onto Facebook.

If you’d rather spend your time on Facebook, but would still like to regularly update Twitter, then use the Facebook Notes feature to pull new blog posts onto your profile, and use an app like Social Tweet to tweet right from within Facebook.

If you just want to publish and go, and don’t necessarily visit Twitter or Facebook regularly, you could use a service like Ping.fm. All you have to do is grab the link from your new blog post, post it on ping.fm, and get on with your day.

I’m not here to tell you what flow to use, so much as encouraging you to find what works best for you, then set up your social media profiles to work with you. Because at the end of the day, tools are only effective if they do what you want!