Linking social networks together

From time to time, someone will ask me about linking social media websites together to make it less work when they update them. For example, if they update Facebook, they might want to automatically update Twitter with the same information.

The Problem

I’ve found it quickly gets confusing when someone has LinkedIn connected to Twitter connected to Facebook, or some variation of that idea. To make matters worse, that kind of setup tends to break a lot and causes quite a bit of frustration.

It leaves people thinking, “Ugh! I have no clue how all this stuff is connected! I just want it to work!”

When these “chain-linked” accounts don’t function as intended it can reflect poorly on your business. You might end end up accidentally publishing to one of the social networks twice every time, or publishing on some networks but not consistently on others.

Obviously, that doesn’t look professional, and can be frustrating when all the person wanted to do was save themselves some time. In most cases they’ve tried to fix it before coming to us, but we end up having to help untangle the mess.

The Solution

Rather than trying to link social networks to each other, we typically recommend you use a service like HootSuite as a single point of origin. Then it starts in one place, and clearly goes from there to all the social networking websites you have a presence on.

Of course, there are other options out there. But HootSuite has a free plan that may be a good fit for you, and right now they also have a plan that’s $9.99 a month that will let you upload spreadsheets of your social media updates, among other features.

Currently, HootSuite supports the following social networks that may be a good fit for people promoting their business with social media:

• Facebook – Accounts and Pages
• Twitter – Accounts
• LinkedIn – Accounts, Pages, and Groups (as accounts)
• Google+ – Pages only, not accounts

Of course, Hootsuite does support some other networks as well, and has many more features that may or may not be useful to you. But if your goal is to minimize the time and effort it takes to post to multiple social networking sites, it’s a great option.