About Ping.FM

Chances are you have more than 1 social media presence and that number will keep growing. Twitter and Facebook are most likely. You may also have a blog or Tumblr site. Perhaps you’re into photography and have a Flickr or PhotoBucket account. If you’re a social media Ninja like me, then you may have well over a hundred social media sites under your name.

Ok, before you say that I’m crazy to maintain so many social media sites, and that I have too much time on my hands – the truth is, its not as hard as you think.

There are many social media services that help you manage multiple accounts easily. I want to share one such site with you – Ping.FM. The idea behind Ping.FM is to turn a single social media update (like a status update) to multiple social media sites at once.

Getting Started

Signing up for Ping.FM is simple. Just create a free account here:
https://ping.fm/signup/

Ping.FM classifies your updates into 3 categories: Status Updates, Micro-Blogging and Blogging. Depending on what you post, Ping.FM can automatically submit these updates to 46 other social media sites.

Adding Social Media Sites

Now comes the tedious part. You need to start adding accounts that you want linked to Ping.FM. The good news is, you only need to do this once.

Adding each account is mostly adding your username and password for each of your social media services. Some services require additional info like API keys.

When you add these sites, some of them will allow you to specify whether to include them in the 3 categories of updates mentioned earlier. For example, in MySpace, you can specify whether you wish to include updates categorized as “Status updates”, “Micro-blogs” and even if you want to allow “Photos” to be posted to your MySpace page.

I just check every option because I want EVERYTHING to be updated. But that’s totally up to you.

Using Ping.FM

Ok now that you’ve linked Ping.FM to all your social media sites, its time to create a post. You can choose the type of post you want to add. For example, If you select “Micro-blogs”, then only those services that you have checked to allow “Micro-blogs” will update. As mentioned earlier, I selected all the options so I can leave my Ping.FM update as “default”.

Additionally, you can select to post the update to a single service by using the drop down menu. For example, you can select “@be” to ONLY post to your Bebo account and not the others.

Lastly, you could click “create a group” to create groups of social sites to update at once instead of all.

These posting options gives you a great deal of flexibility in how you wish to update your social media sites.

So posting is quite simple. Select what you are posting (or leave it on “default”), type your update and hit “Ping it!”. Your post will be updated to up to 46 different social media sites at once.

Posting by Email

When you register at Ping.FM, you will be given a “secret” email address that allows you to post updates via email. When you send an email to update your sites, you can again use the preset commands like “@be” to only update one service or use the “#” commands for groups you’ve created.

Advanced Ping.FM Usage

Now I don’t actually use the Ping.FM interface to manage my accounts. I use several other software services that integrates with the Ping.FM API and this makes managing all these social media sites even easier.

In fact, I have my blog automated to be syndicated to all these social media sites (see the icons on my Ping.FM site below) without having me to do anything. If you’d like to learn more about how to do this, let me know. Leave a comment,subscribe to this blog, follow me on Twitter or Facebook.

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