As an SEO or someone interested in promoting your website, we don’t have to tell you the value of sharing your message on social bookmarking sites and social networks. You’ll already know that.
What you’re no doubt interested in is this. When you have something to tell the world about – a new page, an offer, company news, a blog post – how can you get that message out to as many people as possible, in the least amount of time? Let me introduce you to a tool that’s going to make your life a whole lot easier.
So you’re probably looking for some social networking software or social bookmarking software to automate the tedious process of updating and bookmarking your new content across a huge number of sites.
We’ve tried and tested to death a lot of software in the office. As free software goes, we like Amplify a lot. Amplify pushes out to a bunch of places, including ping.fm which pushes out to a whole bunch more places. It’s pretty good to say it’s free. The downside is that (a) Amplify (and Ping) don’t support a huge number of social networking/bookmarking sites between them, and (b) the ones they support don’t always work i.e. you can’t always link up your accounts (it fails) and when you do manage, the post you made doesn’t always appear on the account you’ve tried to link up. It’s an absolute arse trying to get your accounts working with ping. Last time we tried, we set up Amplify and successfully got it working with Blogger, Flickr, Friendfeed, Plurk, Tumblr, Twitter, Wordpress (hosted), and Google Buzz. We then added Ping.fm to Amplify and we’d successfully got THAT working (through Amplify) with Jaiku, Multiply, Myspace, Photobucket, Status.net and Streetmavens. Which is good, one post on Amplify = a post in 15 places (including the Amplog itself) or 13 if it’s not a photo. But it isn’t many out of the huge list they claim to work with. But, then, it’s free. Maybe the individual platforms change to avoid people using software like this – who knows.
So bear with me here because Amplify and Ping.fm are great as free stuff goes but Onlywire .. Onlywire is AWESOME. Onlywire claims to work with 51 services and by god, it does work. There IS a free version and if you’ve not used it before, at least give this a try – but, it only allows 300 submissions per month and 1 service = 1 submission. So if like me you’re set up with nearly all 51, you’ve got about 6 free submissions a month (with slightly irritating CAPTCHA codes to complete). After that you’ve got to pay, with prices starting at $99 for 5,000 submissions. So that’s about 100 pages of your content or your client’s content you can post through this awesome network you’ve set up, for about £63 and NO irritating capture codes with the paid version. I consider that to be awesome value. One post = costs you less than a pound - what can you resell that service for?
How it works, briefly, is that you download the software. You put the details of what you want to post through the website. Those are sent to your software. Then, your software posts out your content. After that, you can access a nice report on the website to confirm whether your posts were actually successful – something you don’t get with other tools. If you’re an SEO you can use this to report to your clients as it is accurate – I’ve carefully checked my last few posts and the ones that are successful, really are successful – the ones that fail, really do fail (and you can just click resubmit).
We love Onlywire and think it offers great value for money. Click here to get it.
ps. Yes, I’ve tried Hootsuite. It only updates 9 networks and I don’t like the interface. Just in case you were wondering!
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