Cool Tools to Save Time in Social Networking

I found two great time-savers this week to help with the “tedious” part of social networking (to leave more time for the “fun” part!). I’m involved in so many social networks right now that I was beginning to find them incredibly time-consuming. It’s important not to automate your social networking activities entirely. Not many people want to “socialize” with a spambot - they’d like to know they’re dealing with a real live person. However, using these tools appropriately can free up some of your time online so that you can spend it actually enjoying the process of social networking, instead of constantly logging in and copying and pasting important updates from one network to another.

Ping.fm

I started paying attention to some of my friends’ Twitter and Facebook updates, and discovered several of them were using Ping.fm. I checked it out - and love Ping.fm. You should check it out, too! From Ping.fm, I can Tweet, and update several of my networks and microblogs (Linked-IN, Facebook, MySpace, Plurk, Twitter, FriendFeed, del.icio.us, etc.) all at once. Some folks even use it to update their Instant-Messaging buddies.

It takes a few minutes to set up, because you have to enter all of your user ID’s and passwords on all of your various networks, but once you’ve done that, you can easily send out a post about your latest blog entry, or announce your latest bit of news to all of your friends on all of your networks all at once. There are also all sorts of options for customizing and selecting which networks to update with what. Check it out!

[Insert the obligatory warning about not overutilizing this great tool, thus loosing all of your online friends all at once in the process. Remember, many of your friends probably follow you on more than one social network, so this service is not the place to auto-feed ALL of your posts from ALL of your blogs to ALL of your networks. Please. Seriously. We now return you to our regularly-scheduled newletter update.]

TweetLater.com

The free version of this service allows you to schedule (future-post) your Tweets on Twitter. This is very convenient for recurring events such as iRadio broadcasts, or for times when you’ll be on vacation, but still need to send reminders to your Twitter followers.

This service also allows you to set up one custom (filtered) version of your Twitterfeed to post on your blog or elsewhere (first feed is free - additional feeds available for purchase). This is great, because you can filter out the “chat” and silliness that makes Twitter fun for you but might be lost on your blog readers, and post just the “serious” stuff in the feed that displays on your blog or website.

TweetLater.com (free version) also gives you a “birdseye view” of all of your replies on all of your Twitter accounts all at once. It actually alerts you to more replies than your @replies feature on Twitter. The @replies feature on Twitter only displays tweets which begin with @yourusername. It will not display tweets which have @yourusername displayed elsewhere in the tweet but TweetLater.com’s feed does pick these up.

For example, this would show up in the @replies section on Twitter:

@yourusername - Thanks for the follow!

But this would not show up in your @replies section on Twitter (you would need to use a service like TweetLater.com, or Search.Twitter.com to find it):

@hisusername, @herusername, @yourusername - Check out my new avatar!

The paid version of this service (PostLater.com-$10/mo) allows you to future-post to any service, including Ping.fm, which does not already have a future-posting feature.