Social media engagement can be a rewarding and profitable venture to your brand or business. It also has the potential to siphon away most of your free time – time that you’d rather spend with your family or on exploring new ideas to grow your business.

You know what I’m talking about – uploading a videos in YouTube, posting profile updates and pictures in Facebook, tweeting about something interesting every now and then, etc. These tasks are all necessary as you grow your tribes in the different social media sites, but if you can, to some extent, automate the process of updating your accounts, would you do it?

Don’t get me wrong, automation in ostensibly personalized messages to friends is one of the surest ways to get you unfollowed or unfriended. But posting content that’s viewable to everyone, in my opinion, can and should be fully automated.

This is where Posterous comes in. Here are 3 top reasons why you should use Posterous in your social media engagement:

Convenience

Setting up your very own Posterous site is as easy as sending an email to post@posterous.com.  To configure autoposting, rename the site,  and enjoy the other great features the site has to offer, you’d need to claim your account. Afterwards, you can start sending updates to yourname@posterous.com.  You can email all sorts of files (as email attachments) to them – .doc, .ppt, .pdf, .jpg, .gif, .mp3, .mpg, etc. – and they will process and post these files for you. Your email subject line will become the title of the post, the email text becomes the article body, and pictures are posted in gallery format.

Save time by Autoposting

Autopost everywhere – that’s the vision of the people who created Posterous.  Once you’ve claimed your account, you can now configure which other social media sites or platforms you want to autopost to. Your pictures will appear in Posterous, Flickr, and Facebook by sending one single email. You want to post a .pdf document to Scribd or a video in YouTube? Send these through your Posterous. The cool part about this system is that while you’re updating your other sites, you’re also growing your content in Posterous, hopefully building up your own community there and getting your Posterous ranked by the search engines.

There are some things to consider before doing Posterous autoposting. Depending on your content, frequent posting of generic message to all of the sites may not be appreciated by your friends or followers, especially if you’re trying to engage different groups in different sites. To tailor your message to a particular group, you may need to set up another Posterous site.

Privacy is another issue, you’d need to address. If the pictures you’re posting are intended for viewing by family or close friends only in Facebook, you shouldn’t autopost these. Everything at Posterous is public.

Tribe-Building

Your Posterous is also a good venue to hold forums, collaborate with with your peers, gather ideas from your customers, start a wiki on any topic, or simply hang out with friends or distant family members. How? You can actually invite different users to become authors in your Posterous, updating the blog with text, pictures, music, etc. through email.

How powerful can the effect be of an easily-accessible multi-user blogging platform to your business? It’s the idea of ownership and participation that you’re leveraging here. The more your customers or audience feel that their ideas are being heard by you and provided a venue for others to see, the closer they will identify with your brand.

If you aren’t using Posterous yet, you should start one today. The three features discussed here are powerful enough to make a difference in your social media campaigns. If you’re already enjoying the great features in Posterous, I’d love to hear from you how you’re making the most out of this platform, please leave a comment below.

Popularity: 60% [?]

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.