One of the most time consuming features of Social Networking for your business is synchronizing all your accounts. Let’s say you write a new blog post on your company blog, you then have to log onto Twitter and post a link for your followers, and then on Facebook for all your fans. However, there are easy ways to automatically update your blog, Twitter and Facebook so you can rest assured that whatever you post on your social networking sites will be synchronized with your other accounts.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to link to Facebook, and automatically post both Twitter and blog posts to your company page.

How to Create a Blog Feed on Facebook

Follow these simple steps to create a replica of your blog on your company Facebook page. This will automatically import new blog posts and your old archived posts onto your company’s Facebook ‘Notes’ This means your fans can read blog posts without having to leave Facebook and all new Blog posts will be posted as statuses with a brief excerpt.

1. Log into Facebook and then go on your company’s facebook page
2. Click on the ‘Notes’ tab
3. Click ‘Write a New Note’




4. From here, in the top right hand corner click on the ‘Edit Notes’ icon
5. On the right sidebar click on ‘import a blog feed’
6. Enter your blog’s RSS feed URL into the box
7. Click start importing
8. Click continue
9. It will automatically import new older blog posts to your notes section and from now on import new posts.

How to Synchronize Facebook Statuses with Tweets

Unlike many social networking sites, facebook doesn’t have ‘widgets’ as such and therefore it is hard to link your tweets to your facebook statuses – which means a lot of copying and pasting. However, by using applications such as Ping.fm and Twitterfeed it is posible to synchronise your tweets to appear as statuses on your company facebook page. This is also useful for converting “Fans” to “Followers” as you can also post a link to your twitter page with each tweet

1. Sign up for ‘Ping.fm’



 

2. Add ‘Facebook’ Network (needs to be done before Facebook Pages)
3. Connect with Facebook ( log in on your personal Facebook account)
4. Un-check all ‘Connect to Facebook’ boxes (this prevents your company twitter posts from appearing on your personal facebook profile)
5. Check the pages which you wish to receive updates and also check ‘Status Updates’ which means your twitter posts will be posted as a new status.
    
   
6. Save Settings
7. On the next page – ensure ‘Enable My Acount’ and Post to Facebook Pages are ticked but that ‘Post to Facebook’ is unticked.



8. Update Settings
9. Leave Ping.fm open – we will come back to it shortly
10. Ok, now open up Twitterfeed
11. Sign up for an account
12. Add the feed name ‘Twitter’
13. To get the RSS Feed – go onto your twitter profile – at the bottom there will be alink to the ‘RSS Feed of ‘username’s tweets. Copy the Link address and paste it into the Twitter Feed ‘”RSS Feed URL” box.



14. Click test RSS feed – it should come up as parsed ok.
15. Check the ‘Active’ box is ticked
16. Open up the Advanced Settings
17. Change the Update Frequency from every hour to every 30 minutes and post up to 5 new updates at a time.
18. Change the Post Content to ‘title only’ and from here you can synchronise with your bit.ly/ tiny-url account to monitor clicks and traffic.
19. Insert a Post Prefix of Suffix if necessary e.g. Latest Tweet: [tweet] – Follow us @username
20. Continue to step 2
21. Now, In the configure publishing services: click on Ping.fm
22. Go back onto Ping.fm and on the Dashboard, under services and tools – click on ‘Application Keys’
    
    
23. From here copy your Desktop/Web Key ( this should be a code of 43 characters) and paste it in the Twitter Feed ‘Ping.fm Application Key’ box
24. Click ‘available methods’ and select ‘status’ from the drop down box.
25. Click on ‘Create Service’
26. All done.

From here your TwitterFeed account will check your twitter account for the latest tweets every 30 minutes, they will then be posted as statuses onto your company facebook page.

Test it with your twitter account, but allow up to an hour for the status to be updates first time around.

 

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Bit.ly is one of the many URL shortening applications available on the internet. Applications such as bit.ly create a shortened version of the link address e.g. http://bit.ly/2g4TpX – a feature which is especially useful for Twitter with its 140 character limit. However, Bit.ly ( and many of the other URL shortening apps) can also be used as a simple, free marketing tool.

Features of Bit.ly

Click Counter

The most obvious and main feature of Bit.ly is the ‘click –counter’ Bit.ly tracks the number of people who use your custom shortened URL to get to the destination website. This means simply, that you can track how many people are clicking through on your links.

Scenario 1: you have 2,000 twitter followers -> yet only an average of 5 clicks on each link you post. This indicates a low conversion rate and shows that you are posting content which is either of little consequence to your target followers, or that you have ‘un-targeted’ followers i.e. people who are not your target audience.
Scenario 2: you have 120 twitter followers- and an average of 100 clicks on each link posted. High conversion rate with both well targeted content and followers.

So how can this help your marketing campaign?
Alongside the click counter there is a built in free and simple to use traffic tracker, this shows how popular certain things are on different days and also how your rate of conversion is (hopefully) improving. This can help target your marketing campaign and provides the statistics and information needed to track your progress and success.

Due to the fact each URL is measured separately, bit.ly also provides an insight into the popularity of different topics. For example, say you are a …. and therefore post content on both … and … with your target customers being…. . If your bit.ly information shows that there are more conversions for … than…. then you need to re-evaluate your marketing campaign and try to target your followers to more …. – or if the correct target is being converted, you can post more content to do with that topic to ensure more click-through’s and therefore (hopefully) more customers.

Conversations

The conversations feature of bit.ly also gives you information on re-tweeters and different online locations in which your bit.ly URL s are being used. This means that you can accurately track which topics are being ‘re-tweeted’  regularly and which topics need to be focused on. Re-tweeting is invaluable for networking and reaching new clients. Re-tweeted twitter posts allow your message or links to reach extended networks and new potential customers.

Locations

Bit.ly provides a simple overview of where in the world, your followers ( and conversions) are from. This can be helpful in audience targeting and tracking your conversions. Whilst  information on location is provided in greater detail by analytic software such as Google Analytics or a custom tracker, it is still a handy feature of bit.ly.

Where to use Bit.ly

Bit.ly is especially useful for twitter and other websites with a limited character space. However, it is also indispensable for Blogs, other Social Media sites e.g. Facebook and commenting on other peoples blogs – as it provides an overview of which of your marketing strategies or which areas of the internet you are more likely to pull prospective customers from and therefore target marketing.

In blogging it is also an advantageous tool for ‘Read More’ buttons, allowing you to track how many people are actually reading your blog as opposed to just clicking through the link.

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This Week’s Tutorial is written by Giackop  from PSD\Tuts+. This shows how to easily spice up a dull photograph to create stunning light effects like this one:

For this tutorial, we'll need two photos that I took. You can download them to follow along. These are my photos: castle photo and clouds photo.

Show us your Dynamically Lit graphics!

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