Cool Tools To Use: Organize Your Social (Media) Life
November 18, 2008 by Jenny Cromie
Filed under Jobs
If you’re like me, you’re probably LinkedIn, Facebooked, Twittered, Pownced, Plurked, and maybe even Rejawed. Flitting back and forth between these sites throughout the day can be more than a little time-consuming and distracting.
Now, before you think that I spend all my freelance days playing social (media) butterfly, I want you to know that there is a reason why I frequent these sites. As a freelancer, I believe marketing yourself is just as important as doing the actual work. In addition to creating quality work for your clients, it’s necessary to let others know the kind of work you’re doing, build a brand for yourself, and let people know that your door is open for new projects and assignments. Far from a waste of time, use of social media sites can really help build your business.
So what better way to do this than through your formal and informal networks? It’s much easier and more efficient, for example, to let a former editor know that I’m currently working on personal finance stories through my LinkedIn or Facebook status updates than it is to pick up the phone and say: “Hey John, next time you hear about someone needing a personal finance writer, could you pass my name along?” And if he’s regularly reading my status updates, maybe he’s occasionally clicking on the links and reading my stories too.
But to make social media work for you instead of the other way around, some streamlining is definitely in order. Who has time to log into six separate social media sites to do status updates every day? Not me!
Fortunately, some very smart Web. 2.0 developers built some time-conserving applications that allow you to update all your status updates in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and any other social media sites you belong to, all at the same time with the click of one single button.
I’m still in the process of test-driving all these, but one Web 2.0 application I’ve tried and will continue to use is called hellotxt. In fact, I used it yesterday to spread the word about the Q&A I did about Susan Johnston across all the social media sites I frequent. I have found the application easy and straightforward to use. Another similar, promising application is Ping.fm, which also does a similar status update blast across all your social media networks. There are others as well, and you can read about few of them in this informative ReadWriteWeb article, “Six Ways To Update Your Status.”
So how do you use social media to promote your work? Have you used any of these status update tools? Drop me a line—I’d love to hear about your experience with these!
Best,
Jenny
I can definitely vouched for the value of social media networks. I just signed up to Twitter (http://twitter.com/monicashaw) last week and already I’ve gained some editorial comments for some pubs I want to pitch to. It’s also allowed me to interact with established freelance journalists and see how they work. Valuable stuff!
Thanks Monica. And now I’m going to look you up on Twitter. :-) I think social networking sites can be a great way to market yourself and your work. And like you mentioned, it can also put you in contact with others in your field that you might not otherwise come into contact with.
I’m curious about one of your comments above—you mentioned that you have gained some editorial comments for some pubs that you want to pitch to. I’m interested in hearing more about this. Can you elaborate a little bit?
By the way (and I should have mentioned this in my original post), you can find me on Twitter @JennyCromie. And I really am on all those other social networking sites too, so please feel free to reach out to me on those as well.
Social media is valuable for personal branding – ok. But i cant imagine that the services you are describing are time-saving? Are we talking seconds here?
For social media marketing to be effective, time is exactly what you have to invest in them. You have to keep up with your peers; share, discuss, inspire and engange – not just put some status updates in there from time to time..
If you are looking for effectiveness, I believe Twitter is the right thing. The platform levels the playing field and puts everyone back on equal footing; it enables regulars, like me and you, to be heard – despite the long payrolls, SEO-budgets etc. of Huffpost, NyT and others..
Hi Lars,
Thanks for stopping by! I agree that social media marketing does take time, and so does keeping up with your peers.
I have found, though, that if you also tend to update your status lines in these various social media applications to update your peers on what you’re up to work-wise that programs like hellotxt offer a way to do this much more quickly than logging into each program separately. With hellotxt and other similar programs, it literally takes seconds to update your status lines across multiple social media programs. For me, the program has proven to be quite a time-saver.
Thanks again for dropping by Lars!
-Jenny
Agreed, Jenny, though I’m a staunch ping.fm user. Off to check out the RWW article now.
Thanks for stopping by Sharon! I do plan on test-driving Ping.fm as well, so I’ll be interested to find out how it compares to hellotxt.
And if any of you use another Web 2.0 application that really helps you get your work done more efficiently, I’d love to hear about it!
I’ve recently started using Twitter as a way to chronicle my projects, share resources, and connect with other writers. I think it has a lot of potential and have actually created a LiveJournal community for writers to advertise and promote their Twitter streams and find other writers using the tool (the community can be found at http://community.livejournal.com/writer_tweets/).
Hi Jenny. Thanks for the great tip. I just tried out HelloTxt and it worked perfectly for Twitter and Facebook, but for some reason I don’t see it appearing in LinkedIn. Any ideas? BTW: following you on Twitter now. Will send you an invite via LinkedIn. We are both in Writers/Eds group (or one of those anyway). Will Twitter about your blog. ;-)
Lynn
Hi Jenny,
Great post! I’m definitely going to check out the hellotxt tool. I also update my status on multiple platforms and find it rather time-consuming. That being said, if your contacts on the different platforms overlap at all, won’t they see the identical status updates as being status spam? Might they take you less seriously if your status is exactly the same on each platform, or is it not really an important issue?
Thanks Liza! Glad you found the post helpful!
To answer your question about overlapping contacts and status updates, I think it depends on what you feel comfortable with. I use status updates in LinkedIn a little differently than I use Facebook status updates. So while I might include a link to one of my blog posts in both, I also tend to update my Facebook status with more personal information throughout the day.
There is another similar application called Ping.fm, which I have yet to test. So that might be another option for you as well.
Thanks for visiting!
Hi Jenny,
Good post, may I quote you as a source in the Social Media Directory 2009?
I use Ping.fm to coordinate my social media. Currently, I’m using it to update Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Multiply, Diigo, MySpace and a few others.
It offers a long list of services to update, and yes, they are adding to that list. There is also a new toolbar for Ping that makes signing in and update a lot easier. The list of tools and applications Ping offers is good, too.
I haven’t run into any glitches or difficulties with Ping. But there is one element I would really like to see added.
Right now, Ping is a one-way street. You can send updates, but you can’t track updates from any of the social media. I’m thinking about something similar to TweetDeck – an application that would let you choose which services to show updates from.
That would be a dynamite addition.
Thanks for your post, Jenny. And I really will use some of it in the new directory.
Sincerely,
Conrad Hall