I am not a big business, I’m as small a business as you can be, a freelancer. In both the writing and film worlds, freelancing is the norm. Even when I worked on payroll, it was referred to as ‘permalance’. This makes social media not just something I do for fun, but oftentimes how people discover who I am and decide if they want to hire me.
I am busy, I work a full time job, I’m a staff writer here, and I write and do film freelance. This means that my time for self-promotion is limited. The more I work, the less I blog or update twitter. I know I’m not alone as an individual needing smart business approaches to social media. I don’t have a department to come up with plans or to execute them, it’s me, in my free time. So, as much as I love to be on facebook, wordpress, and twitter, I don’t have time enough to give them equal devotion.
I know that there are a lot of consolidation tools, and in doing research for a project, I discovered postling. It’s my new savior.
Postling is an interesting management company because it’s aimed at small businesses and individuals, specifically with an eye to making it possible for someone who works all day to do a day’s work in only a few minutes. It’s unique in being aimed at professionals and free for the simplest plan. It not only consolidates all of the work and makes cross-posting easy and automatic, it allows you to schedule posts in advance and research the responses you’ve gotten and various analytics for your sites. You can also cross share things you like – if someone posts a great news article on twitter, you can share it on facebook.
Even better, in the near future, they will be releasing a mobile app for both iphone and android. And it’s free for the intro plan, and only 9$ a month for the plus account. It’s super easy to sign up. Once you’ve gotten an account, you just fill out what accounts you want linked and you’re ready to go. I had all my accounts in less than ten minutes. It’s so self-explanatory that I think anyone could do it, perfect for people who don’t have time to learn something complex.
