Last week I spoke at an event in San Diego totally focused on using social media to increase sales. My topic...how to get the best out of your business blog.
Aside from the fact it was a great event, lots of buzz, got to connect with new friends, meet clients in person, and reconnect with wonderful gal pal Mari Smith, a ton of content was covered. Maybe even too much for one day, but it certainly had the audience excited. There was a lot of sharing of tools of the trade.
Paul Colligan spoke about how to use syndication to leverage social media. Not only is Paul a dynamic and funny speaker, he provided a lot of value. The big hit was when Colligan told people about Ping.fm, a service I've been using for a very long time.
Ping.fm enables you to be more efficient when you update your social networks. In one place you can update your twitter and Facebook status as well as Plurk, MySpace, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, Del.icio.us and 24 other social networks. One post, updates all over the web and you don't have log into each site. Very cool. Very efficient.
That got me thinking about the other tools I use to extend my visibilty on the web. Here's my list, in no particular order of importance and they're all free:
Ping.fm - to update Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace status
Twitterfeed - to automatically feed blog posts & other RSS content feeds to my twitter stream
Tweetbeep - like Google alerts, sends daily emails with key words I'm watching so I can reply to tweet I might have missed and manage my online reputation
Tweetdeck - hands-down my favorite twitter application that allows me to follow groups of followers and see all replies and direct messages at a glance
Utterli - post audio messages that push out to my twitter stream from my phone
Tweetlater - set up tweets to post in the future. Automatically follows new followers and sends them a welcome message (this is controversial - some people think this defeats the purpose of twitter, but I don't)
Facebook Notes App - set up to feed my blog posts to my Facebook feed so my friends can stay up to date. Note: about 50% of my blog traffic is now coming from Facebook & Twitter and those visitors are more inclined to leave comments.
12seconds.tv - shoot and then automatically post 12 second videos on twitter stream.
TubeMogel - upload videos to one site that will distribute your video to multiple sites. Saves hours and hours of time if you want to get wide distribution of your videos
I'm sure there are other time-saving tools I use, but these are the ones top of mind right now. Would love to see your list of top tools to save you time leveraging social media and the Web!
By the way, here's Michael Stelzner's list of 8 Must Have Social Media Tools.
