Syncing and Cross-Posting

Whether you’re a blogger, a business owner, or an individual that just loves to network you’ve probably
created an account on at least one email client, messaging service, or social networking site. More than
likely, you have several accounts, perhaps some for business and some for personal use or perhaps you
have business or personal contacts accessible through some services but not others. Regardless of the
reasons for having various accounts, you may be looking for ways to make sharing updates and
information to all of them a more streamlined process.

Ways to Sync
Exporting and importing contact lists
 Many of these services have the option of exporting your contact list in the form of an .html
document. The process is pretty simple and usually the sites have helpful walk-throughs. Once a
document has been created, it can be imported easily into other services.

Auto-syncing
 Yahoo! Messenger (version 11.0.0.1751) has auto-sync capabilities. On the “Contacts” menu
there is an “Import Contacts” option. It will open a window showing several different email
clients you can import from. This latest version of Yahoo! Messenger supports contact importing
for Outlook, AOL, MSN, Gmail, and several others. In addition, you can include your Twitter and
facebook feeds.
 AIM now also has similar auto-sync capabilities to Yahoo! Messenger with the addition of GTalk.
 Windows Live also lets you auto-sync with other accounts.
 Smart phones usually have some type of auto-syncing. Mine can sync facebook, Gmail, Twitter,
and my corporate account to my phone’s contact list. When I add new contacts, I have the
option of saving them either to the phone or to Gmail.
 Many websites also have “Find Friends” options that amount to the same thing.

Sync apps
 Before Yahoo! and other popular messaging services figured out that people wanted to combine
services into one convenient place, programs like Trillion were popular. These still exist and can
still come in handy. My personal favorite for my smart phone is eBuddy which combines MSN,
Yahoo!, AIM, GTalk, facebook, ICQ, HVES and MySpace.
 Facebook has several apps that allow you to sync to Twitter and also some other sites.
 A simple Google search for terms like “Twitter sync” or “sync mail accounts” turns up options for
various different add-ons to your browser, your messenger services or your email clients.

Cross-Posting
Syncing isn’t just for ease of access and saving space on a computer or mobile device. It can also help
you when cross-posting updates, links, and such.
Synced Accounts
With the addition of Twitter and facebook feeds to Yahoo! Messenger and AIM, you can use the status
update on these messengers to post content to both sites (bad news for affiliate users: Yahoo!
Messenger doesn’t allow TunyURL.com links in a status update).

Facebook and Twitter are now working together more smoothly in regards to cross-posting. Aside from
the aforementioned apps for personal accounts, business accounts and fan pages now have the option
of directly syncing to a Twitter account without the need of an added app. I enabled this feature for my
blog’s facebook page and my freelance writing business page. When I post anything on the walls of
these two pages, it instantly appears in my Twitter stream (on a related note: Facebook users can now
browse facebook as their pages rather than just their personal accounts, allowing for more
opportunities to spread the word about your business or blog).

Broswer Add-Ons
Even after you’ve synced accounts, cross-posting may still need to be done manually. Not all accounts
support syncing and sometimes you may want to share something to only a few of your accounts.
Rather than the tedious process of pulling up the separate accounts in different tabs or windows to copy
and paste the information, sites such as Sharaholic and AddThis provide browser add-ons with buttons
or drop-down menus on the toolbar to share pages almost instantly to many different social networking
and bookmarking sites.

Automation

Programs
Some bloggers and business owners have found automation programs helpful for posting to their social
networking sites. Programs such as TweetAdder3 (which allows users to build up followers and
followees on Twitter as well as posting automated status updates, replies, and direct messages) have
cropped up all over the place. While these automation programs can serve useful purposes, they also
run the risk of getting the user into trouble for spamming, so they must be used cautiously if at all.

Websites
An alternative to automation programs are websites such as Posterous, Ping.fm, and Amplify, which
provide a means of cross-posting as well as aiding in the blog-syndication process. Posterous is an
especially useful tool, as it actually allows you to email content that will get posted to your blog and
shared to your social networking sites, a one-stop-shop for the busy blogger. It doesn’t seem to support
as many bookmarking sites as the aforementioned browser add-ons, but the ability to auto-post to
multiple blog-hosting sites all at once seems to balance that out.

RSS Feeds
If you have an account on facebook, MySpace, or similar social networking site, blog posts can be
brought in the “note” or “blog” section of that site using your blog’s RSS Feed. I have my blog set up
through FeedBurner, and it syncs with my personal facebook page at regular intervals. RSS Feeds cans
be used to share a blog through the NetworkedBlogs syndication app on facebook, through Google
Reader, and through various other sites that accept feeds. You can also use an RSS Feed on any website
that you can input HTML or Javascript code into. You can also use an RSS Feed to show your Twitter
feed on another site.

There are up-sides and down-sides to syndicating your blog through RSS Feeds. Users who access the
blog through sites other than the one originates from may not feel inclined to visit your actual site if
they get all the content from syndication. However, if you write well and it’s obvious your site has more
to offer than the syndicated version, they may still check the site out. Syndicating through services like
the Kindle Blog Store on Amazon.com has the added bonus of providing the potential to earn a small
monthly income from Kindle subscribers. You can choose to limit the amount of content that is
syndicated, such as only sending content up to the jump break for a teaser that pulls readers back to
your blog.

Go Post!
There are plenty of ways to reach all of your friends and fans simultaneously or within a short time
period, so there’s no longer a need to waste precious time manually posting your updates and links to all
of your accounts. Employing any of these tools can get you back to the business of being in business (or
back to the business of blogging) because, as the old saying goes, time is money.