Now that you have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Delicious, Digg, LinkedIn, Flickr, and probably a dozen other social networking sites, did you ever notice how annoying it is to update your status? Share a photo? Inevitably, some of your contacts are on one network, others on another, and you end up spending more time on the care and feeding of your online networks than it took you to take the photo in the first place. If you manage the online presence for your brand, there are simply not enough hours in the day to be active on all of the networks.
Enter the social networking aggregators. A new generation of social services allows you to cross-pollinate your, or your brand’s, digital identity across most sites. Platforms like friendfeed, Power.com, Flock, and MyBlogLog all offer the ability to integrate your social networking into one place. Post an update to Twitter, and the Tweet flows to your Facebook Wall instantly. Write a new blog post, and it auto-populates to Digg.
These services take a few minutes to set up—you can control read/write access for each available service, so you can make some of your accounts more open than others. But, the benefits are huge: easier control and management of your messaging and greater coverage in less time. If your goal is to engage with customers or friends, these aggregators can turbo-charge your efforts.