Posterous is a super-simple blogging platform that’s been around about a year now. With social media’s popularity at an all time high, I thought it would be helpful to look at how Posterous can allow you to better manage your social networking activities.
They bill themselves as “the dead simple place to post everything” and they’re not kidding. You don’t even have to create an account to use it–you simply email your content to post@posterous.com. You can include attachments like videos, photos, files and MP3s.
Not quite a tweet and not quite a full blog post
Now, I happen to love WordPress and use it for the blog you are reading now. But sometimes you want something even more convenient—not to mention that many people don’t care to run a full-on blog, but still want an easy way to get their content out there (and in more than 140 characters on Twitter.)
But the coolest thing about Posterous is its implications for those of you who know social media is something you should be using regularly—but still can’t see past what you see it as being: a ginormous time-suck.
You may have heard of sites like Ping.fm which allow you to update multiple social networks simultaneously from one place. This service is great as well, and appears to do many of the same things that Posterous does.
I asked the co-founder of Posterous, Sachin Agarwal, on Twitter what he saw as the main advantages of his service as compared to others. He replied:
“Posterous is not only a way to broadcast out. We are your presence on the web with all your media, hosted, and your domain. There’s no limit to what you can post to us, we handle all rich media perfectly, by email and twitter clients. And it’s yours.”
Anytime, anywhere, anything
The main reason I think Posterous is so cool is that it is a way to have a blog and update that blog from anywhere with anything. It can be your home on the web for posting content and a tool for updating all of your social sites—all of which you can do from email.
For example, say I find a video I want to share. I would email the video URL along with any text or commentary to post@posterous.com. If I have my Posterous account set up to update Facebook and Twitter, my status updates there will post a link to the video as well. The link will then take people to the video on my Posterous blog.
Another cool feature is if I just wanted to send the video to Twitter and nowhere else, I would just send the email to twitter@posterous.com. Want to send a picture to just your main blog and Flickr? Email blog+flickr@posterous.com.
See how this could save you serious time? With one quick email you could autopost and update all of your social networking sites without having to go to each one separately. Plus, you’ve got a nice little repository of all of your shared content in one place on your own Posterous blog.
There’s also the feature that allows you to use it as a private site where you grant access to someone else or as a group site for multiple people. Because you can do all of this by email, you can even update Posterous from your mobile phone or text message very easily. Cool stuff.
Are you still trying to figure out how to handle the social media time suck—i.e., finding time to post to a blog, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc. and run a business and have a life? Have you checked out Posterous yourself? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
