How I distribute my content on social networks

How I distribute my content

Every now and then I get the question how I manage to be always online. I always have a hard time explaining that I am not online all the time and that I have some easy tricks to make sure my content comes in the right places. For me there are currently two important places on the web:

1. Twitter (You can find me as @rickmans on Twitter)
2. My personal blog (Don’t Mind Rick)

These are my main channels for interaction and also the main channels I distribute content to and add content manually. The reason I choose for these channels is that I like to keep something like a business card online. On Don’t mind Rick you can see about the things I write who I am (although I should extend my about page) and on my lifestream (which is almost ready) I will aggregate all the other services I am present on and which generate content. Twitter is important for me since on this service all my day-to-day contacts are present. It is for me a great service to get in touch with people, to absorb the immense knowledge that is shared and to give my back the things I know.

Distribution

As you can see in the schema at the top of this post, almost everything is linked to everything, however I put in some effort to prevent to overload people with information. As you might have noticed there is different between the line styles of the arrows, dashes mean that this is a seperate manual action and a solid line means that this is automated. Let me explain the schema in more detail:

Google reader is at the bottom right of the schema; each item I share is automatically shared on my Delicious via a script I wrote a while ago and which you can download at Google Code. All my Delicious links are send to my Tumblr and my twitter account. Also the links are send daily to my blog which results in a daily digest with all the links that I bookmarked or shared via Google Reader.

Another tool I use frequently is Posterous, which is in the center of the schema. Posterous has a great bookmarklet which lets you easily share content. I use Posterous to share my content to my blog, to Facebook, Vimeo, Flickr, Identica and Tumblr. I have little overlap between these services so people with who I am connected aren’t overloaded with duplicate content.  I use Mobypicture on my iPhone  to share pictures to almost all the same services as Posterous does, except for my blog and identica, plus Mobypicture creates an instant update on Twitter the minute I shared a new picture and it publishes on Hyves, a social network that cannot be managed via Posterous.

There are three items on the schema left I did not described yet, the first one is Foursquare, every time I check in via Foursquare it creates an instant update on Twitter. Via Twitter I share every now and then some content to Yammer by adding the hastag #yam to a tweet. Capping IT Off is the corporate blog on which I blog regularly. These content is either original and will be distributed to my personal blog after I published it, or was already published on my personal blog and is therefore republished on Capping IT Off.

If you have any suggestions on how I could improve this setup or any questions how I configured this setup, please let me know.