#twooc day eleven user guide february 2015

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Day ELEVEN: Syndicating Twitter &

tweeting through multiple social networks

The small print:

All this material, whilst given freely for this course, is for your use only, and not for dissemination to anyone else, even inside your own organisation. Please do recommend that your colleagues sign up for the course so that they can participate too at http:/twooc.wordpress.com.

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DAY 11: Outline

Syndicating Twitter

Activity:

Search for current conversations using #twooc on your Twitter profile, and get a feel for what’s going on in our “classroom”.

Read through the notes for the day and:

Go into Twitter, and see what applications and syndication you have already authorised by looking at the apps tab in your Twitter settings.

Connect Twitter to another social account you have such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest or Quora (if you want to)

Create a free Hootsuite account if you want to manage a number of different social accounts including Twitter

Send some tweets from another connected social network such as LinkedIn or Pinterest.

E-tivity:

Visit LinkedIn, find a few of your key contacts and if they’re on Twitter, follow them (a link

should be on their profile if they are on Twitter)

While you are there see if you can find anyone from the #twooc course and add them as a

connection on LinkedIn (including me!).

Note: there used to be an app in LinkedIn that did this for you automatically but unfortunately it’s

no longer available. We will let you know if it’s ever re-instated!

Tools:

www.facebook.com

www.linkedin.com

www.hootsuite.com

www.pinterest.com

www.quora.com

www.instagram.com

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What is Syndication?

Now you’re on your way to having useful, on topic, on brand content on your Twitter timeline, and your tweets are gaining a growing audience, we need to talk about syndication. Syndication is where you set up your Twitter account so that it feeds your tweets to other places online. Reasons for doing this include:

Advertising the fact that you are on Twitter to a new audience

Creating content velocity on your website to help search engine ranking

Delivering content to other social networks, to keep them as up to date with your goings on as your Twitter followers

Creating new online profiles for visibility purposes in other networks, and attaching your Twitter feed to keep them automatically up to date

To then advertise content from your other platforms to your Twitter audience (e.g. to advertise a new blog post)

Updating several people’s profiles at once from one Twitter feed - i.e. each team member updates the same Twitter account, and has the same Twitter account update their profiles.

WARNING ONE:

You can automate the tasks in social media, but you should not attempt to automate the conversation. When you set-up syndication (using the Twitter API – Application Protocol Interface) you should choose tools that allow you to customise what is sent between social profiles, and NEVER choose one that sends EVERYTHING from one place to another, or to everywhere.

What we are looking for is a way of swiftly and easily syndicating the individual content chunks we have created across different sites. NOT an automatic feed of everything to everywhere. This course is just about Twitter, but this holds true across all platforms.

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WARNING TWO:

When you syndicate content the conversation could end up somewhere you aren’t expecting it. You may ask a question on Twitter, and when it turns up in your status on Facebook, lots of your friends answer it there. Don’t ignore them!

Syndicating content makes your REACH & AMPLIFICATION quicker and wider, but you still need to ENGAGE, CONVERT and HOLD on each platform.

Ideally your content will also be syndicated across other platforms by other people – you need to make sure you keep an eye on these conversations too using monitoring tools.

Update your Facebook status from Twitter:

CAUTION – use for your ONE profile, and your NONE to MANY pages. Be aware of the difference.

Do you want to connect your profile or a Facebook page?

Avoid confusing your Facebook friends

Don't swamp your profile with too many updates

Leave certain updates on Facebook for longer.

It also works with Fan Pages - not just personal profiles. This app is one of the few ways to sync from Twitter to a Facebook fan page. Note: It doesn't work if your Twitter updates are PROTECTED

There's usually a minute or two delay (no more) - be patient when you first try it ;)

First, log into facebook and then in the search bar at the top enter ‘Twitter’ and the click ‘Go to your Twitter Profile Settings to start’.

Next go to the ‘apps’ section on settings, the next click ‘Connect to Facebook’.

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Next Twitter will ask permission to receive information from your Facebook, if you are happy for Twitter to do so the click ‘okay’ in the bottom right.

Another option (which you can do as well as, or instead of) is to connect your Brand/Company Twitter account to your Brand/Company Facebook page.

Once your Facebook is connected to your Twitter account you can then go into ‘App settings’ in Twitter and edit what you want to appear on your Facebook timeline from your Twitter account. I would recommend allowing Twitter to post retweets, and post to your Facebook timeline.

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WARNING THREE

If you have already signed up for some form of syndication, be careful that you turn this off first (see today’s final paragraph) before you start today’s exercises.

I have seen tweets ricocheting around the social world when too many syndications going both ways were employed haphazardly. You don’t want your tweets repeating on you!

Update your Facebook status from Twitter:

Much like the following steps where we covered how to update your Facebook status from Twitter

you can also Tweet your status update from Facebook. This can also work with fan pages as well. First

of all you need to go to www.facebook.com/Twitter, ensure that you are already logged into

Facebook with the profile/page and logged into the Twitter account that you want to link.

If you want to link your profile to a Twitter page click ‘Link My Profile to Twitter’, if you want to link a

page click ‘Link a Page to Twitter’.

Next click ‘authorise app’ and then, save changes.

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Connecting Twitter to LinkedIn

You can connect Twitter to LinkedIn from inside LinkedIn, so that you can tweet your LinkedIn status

updates and have your Twitter account(s) appear on your LinkedIn profile.

However, you can only have one Twitter account linked to your status update, no matter how many

appear on your profile.

So log into LinkedIn, and go to “Edit Profile”.

First you need to click on your display picture and name on the menu, this will take you into editing

your account. Next you need to click on ‘Contact Info’ and the click on the Twitter logo at the bottom.

Once you click on the Twitter icon it will redirect to another page which will allow you to add a Twitter

profile. Click on ‘Add a Twitter account’.

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LinkedIn will then ask you to authorise your account: click ‘authorise app’.

You can manage your Twitter settings on your LinkedIn profile by going back into your contact info

and clicking on the Twitter section. From here you can click add another Twitter account, (or add a

Twitter account). You will need to authorise each one with a password separately. It’s definitely

worth ticking the ‘display your Twitter account on your LinkedIn profile’ so that people you are

connected to can follow you on Twitter.

Updating Twitter from your LinkedIn status

Once you have connected your Twitter account(s) to your LinkedIn profile, you will be able

to tweet from your LinkedIn status line. You can tweet to any one of the accounts

connected, but not all of them.

Note that LinkedIn has its own link shortening service built in, if you use a bit.ly link, and

LinkedIn “shortens” it, you will still be able to track it on Bit.ly.

Note that you will still need to keep within 140 characters, or your status update will be cut

off at the end when it appears on Twitter.

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Pinterest

Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social networks. It is a site that enables people to collate

boards of images that connect to websites – think of it as a giant pin board that you can use to collect

links to websites on particular themes such as recipes or social media articles. When you create an

account on Pinterest you are encouraged to sign in with Twitter. It is possible to choose each time you

add or repin an image (or ‘pin’) on Pinterest to share that on Twitter by just ticking the box where it

says ‘Post to Twitter’:

So it is worth connecting your Pinterest account to Twitter as you can drive traffic to your pins on

Pinterest as well as have something to share on your Twitter account.

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Quora

Quora is a social network built around questions and answers. You can pose questions, vote on

answers and share your expertise by answering questions. Quora also integrates with Twitter. If

you’re a Quora user it is worth connecting your Twitter account. This enables you to tweet your Quora

questions and answers by clicking ‘share’ at the bottom of each question.

Hootsuite – managing multiple social media accounts

Finally, we’d like to introduce you to a tool without which we couldn’t manage all the social accounts that we do for ourselves and our clients: Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a ‘social media dashboard’, there are others available such as Tweetdeck, Socialbro and Socialoomph but we find Hootsuite very user-friendly. So far in this chapter we’ve looked at sending tweets from other social networks: what Hootsuite enables you to do is to manage all your social media accounts from one place. It also enables you to schedule posts for the future – very useful!

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You can opt to use a paid account however a free account enables you to manage up to 5 social networks – usually enough for the average user.

Here’s Ryan’s personal Hootsuite account. He has added his Twitter account, Facebook profile, and LinkedIn account.

Once its all connected, you simply click on the icons of the profiles you would like your update to go to – this highlights the profile blue so that you can see where your message will go. You can upload a photo or file to Hootsuite and there is also a URL shortener built in.

You can also schedule a post to go out at a date in the future.

Remember what we learnt earlier in the course? You could use an app to find out what is the best time to tweet and schedule your tweets to publish at that optimum time.

In Hootsuite you can view all in one place what’s happening on your social streams. So here you can see Ryan has added a stream to his Twitter account for all of the #twooc tweets. You can add streams for particular keywords – this might be something you’d like to do to keep on top of particular tweets related to your field.

There is also a Hootsuite mobile app that you might want to download.

I’ll leave you to have a play for today, and get ready for our last day tomorrow when we measure our success!

Happy tweeting

@lizcable

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