Using social networks to keep you honest - Facebook

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Yesterday, I wrote about how using Twitter can be a great tool to document your daily output. But sometimes you’ll want to write a little more about what’s happening in your projects.

Usually people will turn to maintaining their own blog one either one of the more popular hosting services (TypePad, WordPress.com, Blogger, LiveJournal, Vox, etc.) or they’ll host their blog on a server using a blogging platform (MovableType, WordPress, ExpressionEngine, etc.). The end result of this is you can end up with having more places to post your thoughts than you have time to update them.

This is where Facebook comes in with the BlogIt application.

All About Facebook

Facebook is a social networking site second only in size to the popular MySpace service. However, there is one great difference between the two and that is about one year ago, Facebook opened up its API (an API is way for a program to talk to the Facebook network) to the general public. This was very important because in one fell swoop it turned Facebook from just a social networking site to a platform that people could develop applications for. And one of these applications was BlogIt.

BlogIt was written by SixApart (the makers of TypePad and MovableType) for Facebook and its key feature allows you to post to multiple social networks and blog systems simultaneously. Now all of a sudden posting to all those separate networks no longer becomes a chore. As you can see in the photo above, with BlogIt you can not only post your writing tweets to Twitter, you can also update your Facebook status and other social networks you may be on.

The benefit of simultaneous updates is since there are quite a few people who are on different networks and blogging platforms it makes it simple for them to add your status or blog to their own friends lists. Then they’ll be able to follow all of your progress and announcements with little effort on their part. And the best thing is when you send out that press release for your newest novel you’ll have a captive audience already waiting for it.

Beats the pants off of blind e-mailing, huh? Ok, well maybe not the pants, but at least it’s another way to reach your readers and build a community around your works.

This is just one of many ways to reach readers in the blogosphere. Has anyone run into other methods? I’d love to hear about them.