The Missing (Social) Link: Linking Your Social Networks

Home » Social Marketing » The Missing (Social) Link: Linking Your Social Networks – Part 4 [Flickr, GDZILLA]

The Missing (Social) Link: Linking Your Social Networks – Part 4 [Flickr, GDZILLA]

Posted by: Matt Tags: facebook, flickr, gdzilla, Social, social media, social networking, social web, tweetie, Tweetie 2, twitter Posted date: February 27, 2010 | No comment

Flickr Social Sync

This is the fourth part of The Missing (Social) Link: Linking Your Social Networks series. If you have not read the other parts of this series you can find them here:

The Missing (Social) Link: Linking Your Social Networks – Part 1
The Missing (Social) Link: Linking Your Social Networks – Part 2 [YouTube]
The Missing (Social) Link: Linking Your Social Networks – Part 3 [Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Delicious]

Flickr is a bit of a different beast when it comes to linking and sharing. There isn’t a really good set and forget it solution for sending out Flickr posts to both Twitter and Facebook.

I believe that one of the problems with the autoposting of pictures from Flickr is the sheer nature of how we post pictures. It would be really annoying to generate a single Tweet or Facebook post for every picture that was posted to Flickr, especially if we were to upload 10′s or 100′s of pictures in one shot.

Facebook

Flickr on Facebook

I think Facebook handles this well. If you upload a large number of pictures to Flickr then Facebook will post a message to your wall along the lines of “[user] uploaded 13 photos to Flickr”. Your friends can then click through to Flickr to see all of your photos.

In order to have Flickr post to your wall you will first have to link your accounts. The setting for this is under the Extending Flickr tab in the Flickr settings. This works well in theory but I have found that the wall post doesn’t always get through. I’m not sure if this is on Flickr’s end or Facebook’s end. However, most of the time it does work fine.

Twitter

There are services out there that will pull your Flickr (or other) RSS feed into Twitter. The problem with this is that there can be a delay and I prefer a more instantaneos approach. There are genereally two scenarios in which I use Flickr for photo sharing. The first one is for posting and sharing large numbers of photos from an event or activity. The second is for posting one or two pictures of interesting things that I see, usually from my iPhone.

Blog This

Lets take a look at the first scenario. If I upload a large set of photos to Flickr then I will post a link to that set on Flickr manually. I wish Flickr would have an autoshare feature for sets similar to YouTube’s activity sharing. Since I don’t upload large sets on a regular basis, this works fine for me.

Alternatively, Flickr users can add Twitter as a blog. With this enabled you can then post a Tweet using Flickr’s “blog this” link that is above every picture. So, you could post a link from one of your favorites in a Flickr set to Twitter. If your Twitter followers want to, they can proceed to browse the rest of the set. The “blog this” link appears above any picture that you see on Flickr. The settings for this are also under the Extending Flickr tab in the Flickr settings. Our #fb trick from Part 3 of this series will work here, as well, so a Tweet will be posted to Facebook as a status update.

GDZILLA Screenshot

In the second scenario I use the help of a third party service called GDZILLA. Fortunetly, GDZILLA is a set and forget it service. Additionally, you will need to be using Tweetie 2, my favorite iPhone client. GDZILLA is a service that is used as a bridge to posting photos to Flickr from Twitter via Tweetie 2. This means that you can skip Twitpic or similar services and keep your pictures all in one place, on Flickr. GDZILLA has a simple setup procedure that you need to follow on their site. They even guide you on how to configure Twittie 2 to work with their service. After all of the pieces are in place, you can then post to Twitter just like you normally would. Seamlessly, all your shared pictures will be hosted on Flickr. When you add the hashtag #fb, using the process from Part 3, then the Tweet will also be posted to Facebook as a status update.

Conclusion

This series was intended to be a resource for those of you that are trying to connect different forms of social media with the different kinds of social networks. Obviously, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to social media and social networks. With any luck, this series has helped you to link your social networks together so that you can spend more time discovering new content instead of figuring out ways to share it. I will probably revisit some of these ideas in future posts but for now I am going to take a break from this series and move on to other topics.

Do you have any ideas for linking the social web? Post in the comments below.

Other parts in this series:
The Missing (Social) Link: Linking Your Social Networks – Part 1
The Missing (Social) Link: Linking Your Social Networks – Part 2 [YouTube]
The Missing (Social) Link: Linking Your Social Networks – Part 3 [Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Delicious]

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About the author

Matt
I'm Matt and I share how to build an internet presence through internet business, social marketing, lifestyle design and productivity tools. While here, read about me to learn my story or find out how you can hire me.