Last weekend I decided to get to the bottom of  Social Media. Something I have noticed is social media can be a beast to manage. With so many different platforms,  I needed to understand how to properly “connect” my efforts to maximize the potential.  So I decided to analyze  the top 4 social media platforms I utilize:  Facebook, Twitter, WordPress blog, and LinkedIn.

I wanted to understand this:

From Facebook—>  to WordPress, Twitter and  LinkedIn

From WordPress—> to Facebook, Twitter and  LinkedIn

From Twitter—> to WordPress, Facebook and  LinkedIn

From Linkedin —-> to WordPress, Twitter and  Facebook

After conducting some research, what I discovered is you can utilize different plugins and applications  to achieve the result you want. However, not all social media can go both ways.  In some circumstances, it is not possible  due to the the terms and conditions or I just have not found a way!

WordPress –> Facebook: Using RSS technology you can connect your “notes” to Facebook.  facebookadvice.com has a good how-to article.

WordPress —> Twitter: I love the twitter tools plugin. You can have your tweets post on your blog and vise versa

WordPress —> LinkedIn:  LinkedIn has their own applications. Although they aren’t very comprehensive, there is one for wordpress.  You can learn more at Linkedin:WordPress.  The nice thing is all your articles you write in wordpress can be published full text.

Facebook —> WordPress: Facebook Connect is a facebook driven application to post your content from facebook to your wordpress and/or any other website. Using API technology, users can share their information to encourage more engagement. I have not tested this application as of yet, as I am still learning/reading more on the developers boards.

Facebook —> Twitter: Not possible. From further research, applications have been developed to connect content to twitter. However, this violates the terms and conditions of Facebook and the application has been terminiated. To read more visit Facebook 2 Twitter.

Facebook —> Linkedin: Using My LinkedIn application, you can create a button on your home page in facebook for users to visit and add you to their LinkedIn profiles.

Twitter —> WordPress: See Twitter Tools

Twitter —> Facebook: I use a facebook application for twitter to post any of my tweets in my status.  When you combined twitter tools with this application, not only can you tweet from your blog, but any of your blog postings will be posted to your facebook.

Twitter —> LinkedIn: As of yet I have not found an application to connect your tweets with LinkedIn. However, you can search tweets using Company Buzz to find out what people are saying about your company on Twitter. So as of now this is a read only application.

LinkedIn —> WordPress: You can post your LinkedIn resume on your wordpress using LinkedIn Resume. I have not tried this as of yet, but it appears to be an interesting application.

LinkedIn —> Facebook: The only method I found for this is adding a website link under “other”. However, they only allow 3  website links on a profile.

LinkedIn —> Twitter: Same as above. The only method I have found is adding a website link to your twitter profile.

Other Options: Other options I am currently exploring include what you can do on a static HTML website. For example using feedburner.com,  you can create a list or a button of all of your articles from your blog using RSS feeds.

Why am I worried about connecting social media? Very simple.  Not only will this improve my traffic and SEO though interlinking,  I wanted to find a cleaner and easier way to manage my social media efforts. Personally, I believe social media can only be as helpful to your overall business strategy as the ongoing effort you apply. So connecting your social media will save you time and energy.

I hope to conduct further testing and research on other platforms such as youtube.com, flickr.com, technorati.com, stumbleupon.com, del.icio.us, fark.com and so on. I’m sure the list could be endless. For now, I’ll just stick with a few.

Kimberly at greenseedwebdesign.com