If you haven’t heard of ping.fm before, it’s a nice little service that allows you to add a heap of your social media and social bookmarking accounts and post updates to all of your added networks in one go, which can be done directly through the ping.fm site or with SMS, Email, instant messaging bots, or an automatic WordPress plugin.
Obviously this is a bit of a sensitive area as on one hand being able to update forty or so social bookmarking sites in one go sounds like a nice way of creating a lode of quick social media bookmark links automatically, which despite generally being no followed and from low authority profile pages can add up to have some quick win value, but on the other hand it’s just the kind of tool that if used unethically is going to eventually make social media unsociable. So how does an ethical seo use ping.fm?
Well I guess you could manage forty or so different blogging and bookmarking accounts and use them to build up communities but lets face it, the value that you would get from doing this on 90% of those communities probably wouldn’t justify the amount of time spent so we can rule that out.
After playing around with Ping.fm for a few days I found the best way to use the service was to make use of the syntax filters to publish content only to those networks that it will add value to. This essentially means I can use ping.fm as a way to store all of my login details and when I want to publish a blog post, send a bookmark or publish something to Twitter and Facebook but not Linkedin I can – doing it this way gives a bit more control than using RSS apps and only requires remembering one password to update all of your networks, thanks Ping.fm!
I would call Ping.fm an unsociable, useful syndication tool :)
Nice info. just signed up with ping.fm lets see how that works for me.
This is like OnlyWire, only I have just heard of them and have not tried them. But, what I think is they are useful tools in that it will allow you to post to lots of social bookmarking sites with just one click of a button. If used properly, then it is sociable.
I used ping.fm for a short while, but then I started looking at things like FriendFeed and noticed how much of my content was being regurgitated and quickly stopped. Not all social networks are the same and not all audiences are the same; sure you can aggregate your content this way, but I find more value in posting on each individual site with a spin or comment tailored to that community.
I enjoyed using ping.fm since it can also post on my fan page too