Ping.fm – A good time-saving tool for social media marketing, but use wisely

I’ve just set up http://ping.fm to help manage my social networks.

What is Ping.fm?

Basically, http://ping.fm is a free social networking and micro-blogging web service that enables users to post to multiple social networks simultaneously. Making an update on http://ping.fm pushes the update to a number of different social websites at once. This will allow somebody like myself, who uses multiple social networks, to update my status only once, without having to update it in all my social media individually.

How I’m using Ping.fm

I’ve started two accounts for now…

First, as the Web Coordinator at Women’s Professional Soccer, I post news stories on the main league website at http://www.womensprosoccer.com. Afterward, I always post a link to the article on Twitter, then the same thing on Facebook. I try to post to MySpace and Ning as well, but those two outlets certainly get fewer updates than the prior. Now with a Ping.fm account, I’ve gotten all the WPS Social profiles linked in, and now we can update them all at once, whenever we post a story to the http://www.womensprosoccer.com site.

Second, I have a series of personal social networking sites that each get updated, well, basically whenever the mood strikes. By wrapping in my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr, Ning, Skype and Delicious, I’ll have a more coordinated approach to posting my status updates. The truth is that I’m hoping to better share my blog posts with friends and fans this way. My regular Tweeting and Facebooking will remain the same.

Reviews

So far, this is the best description/review I’ve found – A 2009 review on WebWorkerDaily by Eric Berlin:

Adding your various social networks can be a little clunky simply because you need to have all of your various usernames, passwords and network keys at your disposal, but Ping.fm does a pretty good job of making the process as seamless as possible.

On the dashboard page, you can send out messages, or “pings,” to your selected services. The default setting sends your message to all of your services, but you can also filter profiles by “micro-blogs” or “statuses.” This is a nice feature, giving you the ability to parse your messages into groups, but I must admit that I don’t entirely understand which services fall into which categories (is FriendFeed a “micro-blog” or a “status”, for instance?). A character counter also lets you know the size of your ping, which is vitally important for squeezing your message in under Twitter’s 140-characters-per-tweet limit, for example. And a “Record Video” link allows you to stream a video recording directly through Ping.fm.

A nice feature is the ability to send out messages through Ping.fm “from” multiple locations. A huge array of “Services/Tools” on the dashboard allow you to set up your Ping.fm account so that you can ping via email, SMS, instant message, Facebook app, iPhone app, desktop app, and so on. This serves up enormous flexibility in allowing you to send a single message from anywhere and distribute your message to a large number of profile destinations quickly and easily.

The Downside

I am, however, concerned with using the same “social speak” in among varying communities. For example, do #hashtags on Facebook bug other people as much as they bug me? (Ha! This hasn’t stopped me from feeding my Twitter into my Facebook status update. Sorry “friends”!)

Also, the first technical difficulty I’ve run across so far is that I can’t seem to access more than one Ning profile, but I have accounts on multiple networks. I’ll continue to look for a solve there.

More from Eric Berlin:

The potential downsides to using Ping.fm are overlap and not engaging with individual social media and social networking communities as they are intended. Overlap comes in the form of having many of the same friends, colleagues and contacts on multiple services; sending them the same message “over and over again” on multiple profiles might only serve to annoy. Additionally, social media and social networking sites are meant to be two-way communications platforms, not one-way broadcasting mechanisms. If people perceive you as being someone who is broadcasting marketing messages and not interested in engaging with individual communities or, even worse, spamming communities with marketing messages and links, that can seriously damage your ability to effectively utilize social media for whatever purpose –- developing relationships, promoting a product or service, burnishing your professional reputation, and so on -– you had in the first place.

Anyway, more to follow after I’ve had some time to play around with it. I would love to hear your feedback if you’ve used http://ping.fm before.