Ping.fm is an easy to use and free service that makes it easy to update your social networks.

Posting messages on social networks including sites such as Facebook, Twitter or MySpace as well as social bookmarking services such as Digg, Delicious or Stumble Upon offer many benefits. It is a great way to increase back-links, promote your blog posts or articles, drive new traffic to your website or improve your reputation and authority. Unlike Search engine optimisation where it takes time to achieve; social media submissions can deliver results even in the short term. In fact social media gives preference to information that is new. Due to these benefits, Social media has become one of the most effective ways to promote your business, website or blog on the Internet.

On this blog for example, we get hundreds of visitors to our blog posts from social media within a day of publishing a new post. All we have to do is post a short message on various social media sites with the title of our post and a link to the post.

Problem With Social Media Submission:

One of the biggest drawbacks of this approach is the amount of time it can take to post to these sites especially if you use multiple social media websites. Posting a link to a few sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is manageable. However if you use a dozens of sites like most successful blogs do, then it can become a big drain on your resources especially if you post daily.

How Ping.fm Addresses the Problem:

One of the best ways to overcome the above problem is to use a tool such as Ping.fm that enables you to post to multiple social networks at once without the need to log-in to each site individually. What sets Ping.fm aside from other similar tools is the ability to publish your blog posts automatically to various social sites and the large number of supported social networks. See a list of supported social networks below.

1. Create a Free Account

Ping.Fm is free to use. Anyone can sign-up for free and use all of its features.

2. Connect Your Social Networks

Ping.Fm supports many social networks. Some of networks that are supported include Facebook, Twitter, Identica, Blogger, . Before you can submit content to multiple networks at once via your Ping.Fm dashboard, you will need to connect your social networks with your Ping.FM account. This only needs to be done once.

3. Use your Dashboard to Post to all Networks

Once your networks are connected, you will be able to post to all at once with a single click from your dashboard.

4. Add Your RSS Feed

If you want new posts from your blog to be automatically posted to your social networks, you will need to add your Blog’s RSS feed with your Ping.Fm dashboard. This is easy to do and only needs to be done once. Click on the RSS icon on your dashboard and enter the URL of your RSS feed.

5. Customise Your Feed

Once your Feed is connected, you will also have the option to configure auto posting parameters. You can choose how many posts should be made at one time. Similarly, you can also choose how many times should your dashboard check your feed for new posts e.g. once a day, every 3 hours, 6  hours, 2 hours, etc.

Conclusion:

Participating on Social media can drive tones of new visitors to your website within a relatively short time. This would normally take months to achieve via traditional SEO methods.  Tools such as Ping.fm can save a lot of time which can be used for other important tasks.