Be Everywhere! My Secret Stash of Social Media Meta Tools for Easily Syndicating Your Work

by on July 15, 2009 at 4:58 pm

[This has no text appearing on the page, so until we get this solved we shouldn’t have a headline with no blog entry. – jd]

Whether I’m keynoting or participating on a panel or even at a party, socializing and talking business, I get the same basic question over and over.

“How do you manage to be everywhere at once?”

They are not talking about my physical body, which is mostly planted in my Aeron chair moving Personal Life Media forward. What they are talking about is the level of conversation I keep up online via Twitter, on Facebook, in my LinkedIn page, on my blog, with my weekly podcast. And everyone wants specifics. Exactly what do I use and how do I connect all the disparate services together?

I use a couple of really good meta-tools that lay on top of the various social nets, allowing me to write once-post many with my written content and my photos/videos/images. This syndication is at the core of my work and simplifies and radiates my work to my friends and followers across multiple networks.

My constellation of tools includes:

  1. MobyPicture for syndicating my photos from my iPhone and Mac across ALL my socnets simultaneously (kicks TwitPic’s booty) Read my Post Once Appear Everywhere review of MobyPicture here.
  2. TweetLater Professional (there’s a free version) for pre-scheduling Tweets to come out over time about my DishyMix podcast episodes, other shows on Personal Life Media and some of my better blog posts, of which I hope this is one
  3. Trackur for online reputation management and social listening. It’s superior to Google Alerts
  4. I’m also testing uberVU in their private beta as it’s a threaded listening/commenting system, because once you syndicate your content across multiple networks, you get comments coming in from all those places and you need a single UI in which to manage the conversations
  5. and a Twitter Custom Search bookmark on my Firefox browser toolbar that @DaveTaylor taught me how to do: “dishymix” OR “susan bratton” OR “@susanbratton” OR “personal life media” OR “talk show tips” (learn how from Dave here)
Image of Dave Taylor from Twitter
Image of Dave Taylor

Note: MobyPicture is a Dutch company, founded by Mathys van Abbe. More about MobyPicture here. TweetLater Professional is a Canadian company, founded by Dewald Pretorius. Trackur is a US company, founded by Andy Beal. uberVu is a Romanian company, founded by Vladimir Oane and Dragos Ilinca. We met an amazing number of social media start ups on our Traveling Geeks tour which you should check out.

This post will focus on how I use Tweetlater Pro to schedule and use “spinnable text” so that I’m promoting my work over time across Twitter. I do link my Tweets to Facebook, so they appear there as well.

This is an excerpt from my elearning system, Talk Show Tips: 72 Secret Master Host Techniques in which I teach you how to prepare for a conduct interviews but also exactly how I use social influence marketing to promote my shows. TweetLater Professional is a mainstay in my strategy.

logo tweetlater.com
Image by adria.richards via Flickr

Using TweetLater Professional to Manage Your Twitter Schedule
I am so glad Dewald Pretorius (love that name!) had the organizational foresight to invent TweetLater Professional. I follow him on Twitter @dewaldp. I want to be in the Twitterverse on a consistent basis, but I have a business to run and a life to lead. TweetLater Professional “TLP,” for which I pay $29.97, a month is completely worth the price for its time-saving features.

I have a lot I want to Twitter about. I blog, I have my podcast, we do 39 other interesting shows on the network, I find other blog posts and articles I want to share, I like to post about where I’m speaking, I want to “crowd source” answers to my questions…I love to interact on Twitter.  I take a proactive approach to much of what I Twitter. I like to write a whole series of Tweets and then schedule them to appear at times when I know my East and West Coast friends are most likely to see them. Then I supplement those pre-planned Twitters with all of the spur of the moment things about which I want to communicate by Twittering on the fly.

I also know that any one follower may not likely be watching their Twitter stream when I’m Twittering about a specific subject. For important things, like my weekly show, I want to be able to Twitter about it more than one time.  I will write 4-8 different versions of a Twitter about a single episode and schedule them to appear over a 1-3 week period. That way, if one post doesn’t catch your attention or your fancy, another one about the same show just might.

Here is what the basic TweetLater data entry screen looks like.

TweetLater Main Entry Screen

TweetLater Main Entry Screen

Here are examples of four Twitter posts I scheduled through TweetLater Professional (using Spinnable Tweet Text – more below)  to come out in one month about one single episode of DishyMix:

Pivotal Veracity. I don’t know what it is, but I want it. McClosky recommends cool email tools. http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/
The Jazz Club Dolphin on Text Vs. HTML http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/
40,000 Email Marketing Campaigns Later, The #1 Piece of Advice Emerges http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/
Shy? An incredibly convoluted but elegant solution to networking from Bill McClosky. http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/

Notice that they all have the same TwitPWR url?  That way, which ever ones get RT’d, give more power to that single url and reinforce my standing at TwitPWR. I also save draft tweets that include text and a TwitPWR url in it if it’s a really good episode and I’ll want to promote it for weeks afterward.

Spinnable Tweet Text

My very favorite feature of TweetLater Professional is not just scheduling tweets that will be published every X number of hours, days, or weeks. The “Spinnable Text” feature is BRILLIANT. To avoid having the tweet say exactly the same thing every time it is published, you can provide alternate tweet text options (multi-level spinnable tweet text) from which the final tweet text is compiled every time a recur is published.

My Spinnable Text post for the above four Tweets about Bill McClosky’s interview on DishyMix looked like this in the entry box:

{Pivotal Veracity. I don’t know what it is, but I want it. McClosky recommends cool email tools. http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/|The Jazz Club Dolphin on Text Vs. HTML http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/|40,000 Email Marketing Campaigns Later, The #1 Piece of Advice Emerges http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/|Shy? An incredibly convoluted but elegant solution to networking from Bill McClosky. http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/}

Note: You can always cancel or pause these kinds of recurring Tweets if they become noxious or are no longer viable. Also, the directions for how to do Spinnable Text are very well done on the TweetLater console.

In addition to the advanced scheduling, another feature I like in TLP is the ability to schedule for multiple accounts. I manage my own Twitter account @SusanBratton, I also manage the Twitter stream for @PersonalLIfe and I contribute to the Association for Downloadable Media’s Twitter feed, @ADMTweets. I can write any Twitter and decide to post it to one, two or all three of my accounts using TLP.

TweetLater Pro Accounts

TweetLater Pro Accounts

Note: I also own @TalkShowTips and @DishyMix and send potential followers to @SusanBratton to follow me there.

Track Your Keywords on Twitter with TweetLater Professional
I have set up alerts and track a list of keywords using TweetLater Professional too. I use it like I do with Trackur, which I view about once a week. I like getting the Twitter digest every day in email so I can discover new people to follow or who I can tell about TalkShowTips. You can also use this feature to track your @replies, though I keep up with them through TweetDeck when I’m at my desk and Twitterific on my iPhone. It feels more timely to me to get them at those places, than TweetLater Professional.

I am actively looking for Twitterers who are posting about their latest show, so I can ping them about this book or respond to them in general. Here are my current list of keywords and phrases I track:

“latest podcast”, “my podcast”, “my show”, “new episode” ,”new podcast”, “new show”, “personal life media”, @susanbratton, #adtech, #TG2009, dishymix, podcast advertising, show host, susan bratton, susanbratton, talk show, talk show host, talkshow, talk show tips, talkshowtips, plm

This is how the email digest of results from your Keyword Tracking in Tweetlater Professional looks. These are a few Twitters, mostly from others, about DishyMix:

TweetLaterPro Keyword Digest

TweetLaterPro Keyword Digest

The Big Brouhaha About Twitter Automation
I must warn you. There are some features of TweetLater Professional that are unpopular with the “Twitterati*.”

You can set Tweetlater Professional to automatically follow anyone who follows you, even with a 72 hour window to manually review your new followers before you confirm them. Turn about is fair play. You can also autmatically unfollow anyone who unfollows you. Fair enough. You can also automatically send a message to anyone who follows you. I like to thank my new followers, but a LOT of big name Twitters do not agree with me. They feel it’s spammy. They hate what are callled “Auto DM’s.” It’s a personal choice. If someone is really going to unfollow me because I thanked them for following me, then OK. I can live with that.

I am a mannerly woman and I like to say thanks. You should choose what feels best to you. Here’s a post I did on a dozen things to know about managing your online reputation. Always go with your gut. Here’s my SXSW interview with Guy Kawasaki where he says if he’s not pissing somone off, then he’s doing something wrong. With 150,000 followers, he can afford a few unfollows.

Twitter is a big social experiment and you have to have the confidence to feel your way through, apologize for mistakes and try new things! I find an apology is all it takes if you cross someone’s boundary.

Now you know the set of tools I use to “be everywhere” and a bit more detail about how I leverage TweetLater Professsional. Let me know what additional questions you have and tools you like for managing across social nets.

* Twitterati means the celebrity people on Twitter who have a large share of voice. Like the Glitterati or the Digerati… They can wield a big stick with their opinions.

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