Sharing media on Twitter is tricky, because there’s no direct way in which to do so. But linking to media is still an important task for building your brand on Twitter, as I was reminded of this weekend. After trying out a new hair style and tweeting about it, I received a slew of requests for a photo upload. I whipped out the webcam and took a snap shot, uploading it to TwitPic and sharing it with all my followers.
But why can’t this process be made even simpler?
It’s not difficult to use TwitPic. Sign in with your Twitter credentials, upload a photo and write a tweet to go along with it. Your update will post to your Twitter profile with a link to your photo on TwitPic. But the process isn’t very automated. And the biggest downfall from similar apps is the somewhat limited mobile support for automated updates to Twitter.
Twitter is a very mobile-ready service, and the ability to share media on Twitter through third party services would be a huge help for users. For instance, a mobile app that uploads my content directly to a media-sharing service that automatically tweets about my new media.
If you’ve used Utterli (formerly known as Utterz), 12seconds or similar services then you may already be aware of such applications that do have these options. They are also complete and stand-alone services that have a great deal of overlap with Twitter’s existing format.
What may be more appealing to a wider range of users is a service that combines your Twitter account with other major services, such as Flickr. Twittergram has such a tool, where your Flickr uploads are sent through Twitter as status updates. Blip.fm has actually built up its own brand by providing auto-updates through Twitter.
From a blogging perspective, being able to tie in additional content from an automated standpoint allows you to create content without being constantly active on Twitter. It also personalizes your Twitter stream a great deal, when you’re sharing content from other areas of your life. The mix between personal and professional content is a key balance for building your brand on Twitter, and the easier you can stream this, the better off you’ll be.
As Twitter seeks to compete with FriendFeed and Facebook Connect in terms of ease of use for redistributing content through Twitter, adding more direct options for simplified auto-tweets could be a huge opportunity for Twitter and a great enabling process for bloggers.
he biggest downfall from apps such as TwitPic is the lack of mobile support.
May be I missunderstood your sentence, if so I apologize… But I use TwitPic from my BlackBerry with no problems!
Guillermo,
You’re right. I should have been more clear that while TwitPic has mobile support, it’s not promoted as a key use for the service and these third party services overall are still somewhat limited in terms of automated sharing to Twitter. I will update the post.
Twitter is the best social media site I know. There are some glitches that I am working on right now to see how great of a marketing tool it truly is, but so far I have had more success with this than any other social media site out there.