Linking Social Media Sites — Careful What You Share!

This is a short tip I’m going to give you after many years of navigating social media sites toward the objective of search engine optimization, sales, marketing, and just making friends. These days, there is a seemingly endless supply of social networking hubs, re-posters, re-tweeters, aggregators, and mass-mailers (or mass-populators). And the latest fad seems to be linking these services together, so that whatever you post on one, might be instantly and automatically re-posted on any number of other sites.

From an SEO and marketing perspective, this sounds heavenly, but if you’re not careful, it can come back to bite you on the ass. For instance, let’s say you sign up for twenty different social-media sites and hubs. That might sound excessive, but from a marketing standpoint, it’s almost criminally easy to do: Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Mixx, Linked-in, Twitterfeed, Technorati, Bit.ly, Del.ici.ous, and TweetDeck are just a drop in the bucket of social networking sites and tools out there to help you “get your message to the world.”

So the next thing you know, you’re blog is being published all over God’s green earth, and suddenly you realize there has been some overlap. Maybe (or more) of your hubs and re-tweeters have created a social-networking loop that takes your material and spreads it like a disease gone wrong. And suddenly, you login to your Facebook page, only to find your wall populated with different instances of the same post.

Does that sound like nightmare? Take it from one idiot who knows: it is. And troubleshooting something like is not only annoying and time-consuming, but it’s totally unnecessary if you take a little time to get it right as you’re going.

So Tweet away. Just make sure you know where those Tweets are going. Or, perhaps, where they’ve been… as it were.

Paco Ahlgren

www.MyTechTool.com