I’ve written previously about all sorts of marketing technologies, including social sharing, and how they benefit companies, and individuals alike. Particularly, I’ve written a whole series about it for Digital Sales People back in 2014.
Given some of the questions I’ve received recently, I decided to revisit one specific post which was in grave need for an update.
Today I’m talking about social sharing tech.
This post is an update for an article published on June 4, 2014.
What is Social Sharing and Cross-Social Media Sharing?
Well, you already know what this is. It’s when you share something you’ve seen on a social platform so your audience will also see it.
Cross-Social Media Sharing is when you take something you like on Twitter, for example, and share it on LinkedIn.
Why Automate Social Sharing?
If you regularly spend time prospecting or looking for inspiration, on social media, you are likely to also share content there. You may even publish your own content on a blog, or on one social media specifically. Then you like to share that content left and right to get seen by as many people as you can.
The process of social sharing a single piece of content, isn’t very long or complicated, as you well know. However, if you do it over and over, it rapidly becomes tedious and time-consuming.
Automating social sharing will save you a ton of time.
Use me as an example
For example, every morning I read my “news”. Specifically, my RSS reader pulls the latest articles from over 200 sources. Some of these sources publish 10 articles daily while others only put one out each month.
My reader, Feedly, saves me time by not having to visit 200 sites to see if there’s anything new to read. It allows me to rapidly share to Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
However, there are some articles I want to have show up later on my social media accounts. That way, I don’t bombard my audience all at once. I use social sharing tools for this.
How do Social Sharing Tools Work?
Social sharing techs are linkers and connectors that allow for easy sharing of your content to multiple endpoints.
That is, they can connect to multiple sources and social networks. Once connected, you can create rules, or recipes to determine what to share from where to where under what circumstances.
They can thus automatically submit for you, your content to other social media accounts.
The rules you can set will include which maximum you will allow posting on any social network. They’ll also be more specific. For example, I’ve set up a rule where if I publish an infographic to my Pinterest account, I cross-posts it to my Twitter account.
Social Sharing Tool Types
There are a great many solutions out there. However, we can divide them broadly into stand-alone tools, and WordPress plugins.
Stand-Alone Tools
Among the popular and most used social sharing tools, you’ll find Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and BuzzSumo.
These all go beyond social sharing. They are social aggregators and social listening tools.
There are more specific tools that can further help you save time such as TweetDeck which is limited to Twitter. However, its dashboard allows to you manage as many accounts as you wish, cross-post amongst them, and program future Tweets.
Another useful tool is IFTTT which connects to a multitude of social networks and connected technologies. It can be most useful for automating or documenting personal tasks. Unfortunately, IFTTT has lost some of its luster in the last year as some social networks have shut down its connections. For example, you can no longer connect with LinkedIn.
In any case, you should test these tools before settling on one. Although this may take a little time, it will save you much more in the long run, and avoid you getting frustrated for any reason.
WordPress Plugins
If you host a blog with WordPress, you want to share your content everywhere relevant to get more traffic.
You might consider some of these plugins to automatically share your articles when they have published: Social Booster, WP Social Sharing, Shareaholic, Social Snap, Social Warfare,
Some of these plugins are free while others have a monthly fee. You should check them out to see what they do as they are all slightly different.
