How to get your blog content onto Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed using free services.
I had been using the excellent and free Twitterfeed to autopost to Twitter but just switched to WP to Twitter, a WordPress plugin. Here’s why. Twitterfeed reads the Polizeros RSS feed and takes about first 120 characters of new posts, adds a tiny URL, then posts it on Twitter. This often results in truncated posts that break in the middle of a sentence because everything has to fit into 140 characters. Sometimes the meaning isn’t clear, and plus it looks autoposted. With WP to Twitter, when I create the post for Polizeros, I tell it exactly what to post to Twitter. While this may take a little extra time, the result is that Twitter posts now are full sentences with no truncation and thus are much more understandable. I can also tell it not to post to Twitter, which can be handy.
Once a post is on a social networking site, you can configure other such sites to autopost from it. For example, I have Friendfeed configured to autopost from Twitter. (In fact, they both autopost from each other, and don’t duplicate content either.) One important thing. If I post to Friendfeed first, the link that the autpost to Twitter has will be the Friendfeed link, not original link to here. However, if I post to Twitter first, the Friendfeed autopost link will be Polizeros link. This is what you want. So post to Twitter first.
I also have Facebook configured so status messages (and nothing else) get posted to Friendfeed, then Twitter.
You can also use Posterous to post wherever you want via email. If I take a photo on my iPhone, then email it to facebook@posterous.com, it gets posted onto Posterous and also Facebook. It will repost to multitude of services.
TweetLater allows you to publish to Twitter in the future, say one post a day for two weeks, that sort of thing.
BTW, Google Profile is a great place to list all your sites as a reference for others. Here’s mine.