Where to post?
Lately posting has become a lot more complicated.
Putting People First (PPF) started out some years ago as a dumping ground for all kinds of articles and readings that I found interesting and worthwhile sharing. It gradually became a much more precise resource, focused on user-centred design and experience design and has found a loyal following of over 6,500 readers per day since. Articles are often reposted automatically, including on uxnet.org.
Core77 was added later on: it became the place for me to post everything that didn’t fit on PPF and was design related. The only negative: Core77 doesn’t provide me with a feed of just my articles.
But now there is also Facebook and Twitter, and I am a bit lost.
I am using Facebook primarily for non-private purposes, and post articles and links there that are of interest but would not necessarily post on PPF or Core77. Posting is also incredibly easy, and I have set up feeds from PPF and Twitter so that everything I write – except for Core77 – automatically gets reposted there. You can even see my profile updates without “friending” me, even though that is a bit of a problem with Facebook: it is a reciprocal platform and encourages you to read whatever everyone else updates. Quite often I don’t have the time.
Twitter on the other hand encourages “following”. Many more people are following me than me following people, and that suits me just fine. Except that I don’t know what I should twitter about, or what would make my twittering different from my Facebook updates, my Core77 posts, and my PPF articles.
How are you confronting this?
Probably to be updated.
The approach I use is to merge everything together.
The simplest way is to import your blog posts into Facebook using the ‘Notes’ feature. Saves you worrying about creating different content for different places. And if and when you do have something unique or different for your FB network you can still post it independently.
You can similarly set up automatic tweets to your twitter account every time you post. That sort of takes care of the need to keep coming up with original tweets while still giving your blogs more exposure – here’s an example using my twitter account – http://twitter.com/rizwantayabali . I recently experimented with twitter and found that while I was posting random personal stuff, I got very few followers, but the minute I focused my twitter profile to reference my subject of interest and began to tweet my blog posts, I suddenly got a bunch more followers. I think this suggests that like blogs, most twitter followers are also looking for pointers to valuable content related to their spheres of interest.
This is a great blog by the way. My only issue would be that in terms of putting people first, forcing people to register/log-in before commenting sort of rather goes against that philosophy in the user experience stakes. It must also significantly reduce the number of comments you get, which seems a shame because your posts are usually very interesting.
Regards
Rizwan
http://www.multichannelthinking.com
http://www.urbansurvivalproject.org
Thanks Rizwan.
I already implemented an import rss feed from PPF to Facebook, and followed your advice on setting up a tweet from PPF to Twitter.
You are right about the registration. I get an awful amount of spam and had to put it in. Do you have a suggestion so that you don’t have to register anymore, while I still have spam protection?
Mark
Just added a captcha plugin – let’s see how that works – no login is needed.
Mark
Great question.
My blogging has fallen because of Twitter, but I’m not happy about that. My goal going forward is to use Twitter as a whiteboard for ideas and flesh em out fully on the blog.
Similarly, on comments – two paragraphs or less=comment only. More than two paragraphs=extend the thought on my blog with a link back.
Integrate. Integrate. Integrate. The services are making it easier to do so these days, and with so many bits floating about it’s becoming more critical if you want to maintain your sanity. Here’s how I keep my posting context together at the moment:
I use Twitter for the immediacy of posting quick updates, comments and replies. If those thoughts are more well formed and not time sensitive (like replies), I usually try to post them as “notes” on my blog, unraveled, and use TwitterFeed to automatically import them into Twitter. For more mature ideas and commentary, I’ll post them as an “entry” on my blog. Entries do not get synced to Twitter as the content is lost with the 140 character limit. Blog posts happen rarely enough that I’m happy to tweet them manually. I use the Twitter Facebook app to sync my tweets (and accordingly my blog notes). Beyond this I generally don’t post to Facebook.
The aggregating/reading context of all these bits is just as interesting, but I’ll save that for another post.
fantastic. this plug-in makes it so much easier to comment! the notes functionality in FB automatically pulls your posts through and allows you to tag specific people that you want to flag the content to, which I find very useful. if you aren’t already using twitterfeed, it allows you to import posts from multiple blogs as tweets.
Pulling in my feed from Twitter (@smjdesign) via TwitterTools has worked well for my personal website. I doubt however that I will be adding it to my professional websites anytime soon. Make sure though if you bring them into your blog and subsequent RSS feed that your entire homepage isn’t full of tweets and remove all @replies. I call the tweets on my blog “asides” similiar to Matt Mullenweg’s (of WordPress fame) idea about asides which I think makes a little more sense to the non-Twitter initiated.
Also, by hacking the TwitterTools plugin for WordPress, I can decide which tweets get posted to my blog by adding a tilde to the beginning of the tweet. It’s not a lovely hack, but it works well.
I’m using twitter for phrases / quotes I find interesting and I want to keep somewhere. If I’m not in front of a computer (e.g. having a conversation in front of a drink with someone), I may decide to text it (when the conversation is over, of course).
Also I’ve used a secondary twitter account for keeping track of my diet for a while