In September Voloper released Phase 1 of its Social Media strategy: the Social Media ToolKit. The Social Media ToolKit gives you a centralized control panel for configuring which social media widgets you're pulling into your own web site.

In Phase 2, Voloper's Social Media Toolkit now supports "Social Media Push". As the name implies, Social Media Push means instead of pulling social media content into your website, you're pushing content out to your various social media venues like Twitter and Facebook.

With Social Media Push technology, many of your Voloper modules contain a wealth of information that can be automatically injected into your social media stream. Simply put: Write it once, publish it to your site, and automatically push it out to Twitter, Facebook, or Flickr. No need to cut and paste.

Modules

Currently the following modules have Social Media Push functionality:

Voloper Blog: make posts and automatically push out your blog title and posting URL to Twitter and your Facebook wall.

News Manager: New article titles and article URLs are automatically pushed out to Twitter and Facebook.

Photo Sweet: Added images are automatically added to your Flickr account, including descriptions and tags.

URLs can be automatically shortened using the Bit.ly service.

Watch the video on how this works

Before You Begin

Before you begin pushing out content, there are a few steps involved.

Step 1: Make sure you register for the social media venues you wish to use. So make sure you register for Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and the Bit.ly service. I know you're probably thinking DUH! but I'm a technical writer by trade and just want to cross my T's and dot my I's or I literally can't sleep at night.

Step 2: Visit Facebook, Twitter, etc. and apply for developer keys. Here you're probably going "what?" Consider: you want your blog to automatically push content out to Twitter. Before you can do this Twitter needs to know your blog module has rights to post to your Twitter account.

You don't want spammers taking over your Twitter account, right?

So you need to go to your Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr account pages and apply for keys. These keys you then store in your Social Media Toolkit. Any module that needs to post out to Twitter, Facebook, or Twitter then simply accesses the "key locker" in the Social Media ToolKit and sends the keys to the social media site as a kind of password.

Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Bit.ly (in their infinite wisdom) do not make the links to find the application pages obvious. But luckily my fastidious technical writer personality has cataloged the links for you (these are subject to change in the future, I'm sure):

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/developers/

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/services/apps/create/apply/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/apps

Bit.ly: http://bit.ly/account/

The Social Media Toolkit manual will walk you through the rest of the setup.

Step 3: Enter the keys into the Social Media ToolKit and then authorize your keys.

Step 4: We've also added a Posting Configuration option to the Social Media ToolKit. This lets you define a few universal options for Flickr and Twitter.