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Syndicated Social Media Updating

There are many desktop and web-based apps out there that offer the convenience of updating all of your various social media accounts at once. Type one status update in, click a box, hit enter and, BOOM, your Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Posterous, LinkedIn, WordPress, Blogger and Foursquare accounts are all updated at once. With the same message.

tweetdeck

Ping.fm was one of the first apps to offer this functionality. TweetDeck now allows you to post to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.  You can even post to Twitter from Facebook.

Cool. Right? Except I can’t stand it.

My friend Alissa Sheley at Jones Huyett Partners in Topeka posted about this very topic recently. She and I share the same opinion about these mass updaters. Alissa said, “I have many concerns, but here’s my biggest: Each social network has different parameters, a different personality, and in most cases, a different audience.”

And that really sums it all up for me. I post differently on Facebook than I do on Twitter. Some of this has to do with the character limitations on Twitter (140 characters). I also want instant gratification – don’t make me click a link in Twitter that sends me to your Facebook page so I can click again on the link to the website you are trying to tell me about.

I also know that I have different audiences on Twitter and on Facebook. For K2Media, I know our Facebook page has quite a few non-social media-types as fans. People who know us and want to keep up with our business. People who are clients or prospective clients who might look to our page for educational reasons. Our Twitter followers are largely PR, communications, marketing and social media-types. We share knowledge but in a different way. No need to preach to the choir, if you will.

We are also more apt to update Twitter fairly often throughout any given day. Given the transient, real-time nature of Twitter, this is common and, from most Tweeters, not annoying. On the other hand, I tend to get aggravated by Facebook fan pages cluttering my news feed with multiple updates a day (depending on the page, of course).

So, yes. I think it’s more important to recognize your audience in each social space than to make it ultra-convenient for yourself by auto-populating all of your social profiles at once. And, as Alissa noted in her post, it is extremely important to be present in each social space in order to monitor any response or engagement with your business messaging. You can send 10 messages out at once – but if you’re not there to answer a question or follow up on some interest in your message, what good was sending the message at all?

[Note: I do regularly use one mass updater, TubeMogul. At TubeMogul, you can upload video simultaneously to multiple video-sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Yahoo and more. While your video is uploading, you can title, describe and tag your video once and have the video, title, description and tags automatically posted to each video site. TubeMogul then collects and aggregates viewing statistics by video and by site. It is very convenient – as video can be time-consuming. It is still important to monitor the video profiles on-site for relevant comments and questions though!]

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