If you’re a Zelda fan like me, you’ll recognize the TriForce. Wisdom, Strength and Courage are great values in life, but in social media, there’s a new TriForce, and you don’t need to wear a silly green outfit or carry a sword to win in the social media game.

Trying to keep active on Twitter can become cumbersome. Even if you use applications like TweetDeck,  you still have to copy-paste links, shorten URL’s and switch back and forth. If you’re a conversationalist, TweetDeck and similar applications are perfect, but if you really like to put quality information for people to see, there’s an easier way!

FriendFeed & StumbleUpon.com As THE Tweeting Tool

If you haven’t heard of, or been using FriendFeed as a tool to share information, you’re missing out. You’re missing out even more if you aren’t using the StumbleUpon toolbar for Firefox. If you aren’t using Firefox – You’re nuts! Get it now!

How FriendFeed Works

FriendFeed takes all your activity on just about any social media profile and allows you to re-distribute this information across all other profiles. For example, if you tweet something, FriendFeed will find this tweet and send it to your Facebook Wall and your blog. Or, you could favorite a link on StumbleUpon or Digg, and it would submit it to your twitter profile in normal Twitter style, it’ll add it to your blog, your MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

What You Need To Do First

1. Get accounts at FriendFeed.com, StumbleUpon.com and Twitter
2. Login to FriendFeed and link your StumbleUpon and Twitter account.

Next, Utilize The Social Media TriForce – Stumbling, Friendfeeding, Tweeting.

Stumbling

Using the StumbledUpon toolbar, click the search tab (Default will show you the term “all”) – You’ll be able to find only sites that relate to your search, saving you a TON of time. For example, if you wanted to find exclusively “zelda” related websites that other people have found useful or cool, you would enter Zelda in the search field. (doh!)

Once you click the Stumble button, you get wonderful sites like these gems.

The last step, and of course the most important one, is clicking the thumbs-up button on the left of your StumbleUpon toolbar. This will send the link to your favorites on StumbleUpon.com, making it available for FriendFeed to pick it up.

That’s All The Work You Need To Do!

Everything else happens behind the scenes. FriendFeed picks up your links and sends them out via Twitter, formatted perfectly for your readers. It’s that easy!

Caveats / Other Concerns -

1. It’s important you use the search terms to define what is shown on StumbleUpon. It’s easy to get off focus, and your business isn’t going to benefit from Tweeting a funny photo of an enamoured dog puking. Make sure you remember to use a different StumbleUpon account to thumbs up off-topic photos, articles, etc.
2. On the other end of the spectrum, make sure you throw out a humorous, preferrably appropriate link every now and then to break up the day. Variety in your posts will keep people interested in what you have to say next. If you throw out 100 links, albeit beneficial and informative, if they are all on the same topic, you’re going to overload your followers and they may get bothered.
3. Don’t do all your Stumbling at once! If you do, your posts will be updated all at once, and you’ll appear to be spamming Twitter and could lose followers. Also, your great links will be lost in the chatter. I actually found this to be frustrating, so I made TwitterPilot so I can queue 50 great links and have them shoot out all day long, one every 15 minutes in  a loop, so my followers an get a steady stream of my info and get a second or even third chance to see my links. Obviously I take care to communicate with people on Twitter as well.
   
   *NOTE – If you decide to use TwitterPilot.com, you should know that it’s in alpha version despite what it says on the website. I’m working to fix the bugs, but it works. I recommend setting up your queue in the late evening, linking 50 – 100 sites (of possible), set your loop to every 15 – 30 min, and enable your queue. Then sleep. When you get up, you may be surprised at how many followers you get!

Remember, with great power comes great responsibility. Now, off to save the princess!

Show Me Some Love If I Deserve It!

Tags: Client, Digg, facebook, Firefox, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, MySpace, social networking, StumbleUpon, TweetDeck, twitter