One of the things about social media is that each platform does its own thing well. Flickr and Picasa are designed around sharing photos. Twitter is structured for SMS posts (140 characters or less). YouTube and Vimeo are for video. And the list goes on... And while it is wonderful to have all of these services that host our content so well, most of us who live and breathe social media find ourselves managing multiple accounts. But what if we didn't have to? What if a single service brought all of the elements all together?
Posterous started out as a simple blogging platform that has now become a vehicle for posting to everywhere simply. In fact it is so simple that you don't even have to sign up for an account. You can simply send an e-mail with the content you want posted to post@posterous.com and voila! your posterous stream has begun. (Of course, you will likely want to claim your account to give ownership to the content posted so you can manage it.) The ease of Posterous is that it works via e-mail. You send text alone or attach photos (jpg, png, gif), video (avi or mpg), mp3's or documents (doc, pdf, ppt) to your e-mail and they are posted in real time.
How to use Posterous
Say, for example, say you want to post a simple blog post with an image. In your e-mail, make the subject your title line. Make the blog post your e-mail text. And attach the photo you want posted with your content. You can even tag your post by adding ((tag: tag1, tag2)) to the subject line. That's a double parenthesis, the word 'tag' with a semicolon, then the tags you actually want to use and close double parenthesis. Once you hit "send" a few seconds later the content is formatted and goes live. You will want to delete your e-mail signature or type #end after the text you want posted.
What makes Posterous different from Blogger or Wordpress--who also let you post content via e-mail--is that Posterous will not only post the content to your Posterous page, but also to every other account you have linked to it...Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Blogger, etc. Making it very easy to manage all your social media sites through a single outlet. Of course, you won't always want to post the same things to all of your accounts, so Posterous has an option for that. To post everywhere, you would send to post@posterous.com. To post only to twitter, send your e-mail to twitter@posterous.com. Flickr? flickr@posterous.com. Your blog? blog@posterous.com. You can even combine them: facebook+blog@posterous.com.
Smart Posting of Content
One of my favorite features is that Posterous is "smart" when posting your content. Content over 140 characters sent to Twitter is shortened as a link. MP3's that are posted (simply by sending as an attachment with your e-mail) are put into a player so that the post shows up as an easy to press "play" button. Photos are resized to be web friendly, and video is transcoded to a flash player that shows in your browser. (They host the file so there is no work to do.) URL's are posted as a link, but if you send a YouTube link, Posterous automatically embeds the player.
When you post multiple photos via email, Posterous automatically creates a gallery of those images. If, you’d like all your images to appear inline in the same post, just add this exact syntax to your subject line: ((nogallery)).
Easy Analytics
Posterous makes it easy to track traffic on your site. You can use their dashboard to monitor site views and page views per post. You can also add in your Google Analytics Domain ID in the settings portion (Manage -> Edit Settings) of your Posterous account. You can also track your RSS feed using Feedburner. Once you burn your Posterous RSS feed, you can paste the new feed URL in the Feedburner box (below the Google Analytics box).
Using Posterous with Multiple Contributors
Posterous is easily used as a community site. Simply click "Manage" at the top right of your Posterous account, then select the "Contributors" tag. Enter the e-mail addresses of the people you want to invite and Posterous will invite them. They will send content to post@nameofsite.posterous.com. Your settings can allow contributors posts to go live immediately or be moderated by you. You even have the option of giving the site a group profile--which allows you to show a different profile and photo of your blog from your own.
How Much Does it Cost?
As with most social media platforms, Posterous is free. Expect advanced features to be released in the future to allow the team at Posterous to make some money.
Of course I highly encourage you to take Posterous for a test drive, simply open an e-mail, type in some content, and hit send.
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Update: Posterous now supports "pages." Different to "posts" pages stay in place. Which means, you can use a posterous site as your main website having different static pages that stay in the main navigation while the front page remains dynamic with posts.
© Cathy Hutchison 2009
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