Anything that persuades Steve Rubel to stop blogging must be worth a try.
So over I tootled to Posterous and got myself an account, in fact I got two. One for me as Ed Richardson and one for Digital Signals.
What is Posterous and what's all the fuss about?
Posterous is a new social media platform that publishes all your content in one place.
What's so new about that, I hear you ask, surely Friendfeed has been doing that or there abouts for years?
Posterous reverses the process of Friendfeed, rather than aggregating all your other feeds, at Posterous you post there and then decide where else you want to post to at the same time.
The big thing about Posterous is that it lets you publish content via e-mail. Well, you send an e-mail and the platform takes care of the publishing. Which is quite nice.
But then, whenever I have e-mail access I generally also have access to my blog and other publishing platforms, so why would I bother e-mailing my content and not just access my blog directly and publish from there?
Okay, but publishing micro blog content via e-mail isn't end of the services that Posterous offers, it also allows to post to numerous other social media platforms by e-mail.
The platforms they currently support include:
- Flickr
- Picasa
- YouTube
- Vimeo
- Tumblr
- Blogger
- Wordpress
- Xanga
Amongst many others.
You can either send an e-mail to all of your accounts in one sweep with an e-mail address to [email protected] or you can specify the account you want it to post to by defining a platform in the e-mail, such as [email protected].
You can also include wildcards in the syntax to post to accounts that all contain specific text. For example, I manage accounts under my name Ed Richardson and also my identity Digital Signals; I could post to all Digital Signals related accounts but not Ed Richardson accounts by including #[email protected].
You need to set-up the e-mail accounts that Posterous will accept posts from, for authentication reasons. Also, all e-mail syntax as illustrated above will include your account details. In my case @edrichardson.posterous.com.
Now I can see great benefits in this, with multiple platforms that require you to update content on a regular basis, you could hit a number of platforms with one e-mail.
My only issue with this approach, and it can be a big issue, is that you can lose some of the personal attention that should be shown to each platform.
All of the technical benefits aside, I like the Posterous interface. It's easy to use and has a clean but nice style.
I'm always wary about putting too much effort into posting content on domains where you don't own the site. Content writing is time consuming and can, at times, be labourious; at others times it's a pleasure I might add!
Putting all these hours into writing content that should be improving your search optimisation can be lost if you don't own the domain. Obviously Posterous allows you to post to your blog, so it does help with avoiding this issue, but it is always something that I'm conscious of.
I might add they also allow you to host the service on another domain, avoiding this issue all together.
There is the flip side of the coin in that the chances of a highly visible site, such as Posterous, is likely to perform better than your average blog in search engine results. Therefore managing a balance between these considerations is essential for raising the awareness of your on-line presence.
Posterous is gaining all the right followers it needs to make a success of itself, Steve Rubel recently declared his love of the service. After my recent post on TweetDeck success I found their TweetDeck blog was published via Posterous.
With a community element where Posterous shares what's new with other registered members, you might just get the eye time of one of these prestigious members. I don't spend enough time taking advantage of these community elements on existing sites such as Alltop that I'm registered on, but perhaps you do.
I'm yet to commit any real time to my Posterous account, so I'm sure I'll come back with some more informed opinions at a later stage.
But from what I've seen so far I think the Posterous team have found a small niche in a competitive market that is unique. They've also made the effort to ensure that from the off the product is a well thought out solution and looks neat.
Whether I'll find the time or inclination to make a real go of the platform is yet to be seen, but I wish them luck all the same.
Let me know if you've explored Posterous yet, and, if so what you think?
Related reading:
Why bother with social media? - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/06/why-bother-with-social-media.html
Sharing content - Extending the value of existing content - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/03/sharing-content-extending-value-of.html
Quality, not quantity - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/02/quality-not-quantity.html
The real value of social media - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/01/real-value-of-social-media.html
Link to original post