This week’s edition of the Overflow Podcast is an offshoot of attending the 2009 Georgia Techno Tourism Conference. The program is put together by the Georgia Tourism Foundation and the Georgia Department of Economic Development. The conference gathered participants from around the State from various Convention and Visitors Bureaus, destinations, attractions, hotels and other organizations interested in promoting tourism in Georgia.
The title of the conference was Social Media Marketing .. Affordable, Effective and Essential. Obviously, social media efforts were the main topic for each of the presenters during the two day agenda. What developed was a common theme about looking for efficiencies and automation to help manage the time commitment involved in social media campaigns.
We felt that we should do a followup podcast to detail the tools that we use to help with the process ….. with one caveat. We don’t necessarily agree that you SHOULD automate the entire process of posting to social networks. In order to fully engage in the social networks, the content that is posted should be applicable, relevant and targeted towards the audience that is congregating on each network. By using automation tools you run the risk of presenting items that do not appeal to the audience and might damage your brand reputation.
Keep in my that if you only post your blog RSS feed into Twitter, then why would anyone follow you there? You may be missing out on the opportunity to develop a real relationship with a customer, but if you only use it to publish blog posts, we’ll just subscribe to your RSS feed.
However, here is a rundown on some tools to consider.
The first tool that we reference is Tweetdeck. The version 0.25b contains a simple checkbox that allows for posting messages to both Twitter and Facebook. Cameron and I both use this tool, and determine at the point of publish where the message should appear.
Mary Boland from Rabun County CVB detailed how she uses the RSS function of the various blogs that she produces, to distribute the content to the Facebook Group page using the Notes application.
Here are some screen shots for integrating an RSS feed into your Facebook page:
1) Notes Application Page, Find the Edit Import Settings:
2) On the Import Settings Page, place the RSS feed link for you blog:
To integrate some content from Social Networks into your blog, you can find user generated content on YouTube and embed a player on your site so new videos will appear as they are posted on the subscribed channel.
A publishing tool that we have not used, but have heard mentioned a lot is Ping.fm. There are numerous social networks that Ping.fm can post to from a single point of distribution. Beware that there are some who consider the use of this tool as a form of spamming content across all social networks.
Talk during the presentations turned towards the help of interns posting to the social networks, and it was agreed that the potential for problems could occur, the group was assured that it had not happened and that the interns were grateful to be able to display real world experience on their resume upon graduation. Specific guidelines were provided regarding what could be posted.
We applaud VisitAthensGA for being upfront about the fact that it is an intern who is posting, and they clearly demonstrate it in the Twitter profile seen below:
Almost forgotten to be mentioned on the podcast was the application called Twitterfeed. Signing up on Twitterfeed will give you the ability to automatically have blog posts appear as a Tweet.
Finally, we caution against getting overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information that was presented and all of the social networks that were touched upon. Craft a strategic plan that will get you familiar with using the networks first, then worry about automating the process of getting a consistent stream of content published.
