Blogging Tips

Sendible lets you connect all of the major social networks, plus a few more so that you can send messages directly from the site. Sendible currently supports: BrightKite, Facebook, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, MySpace, Blogger, Plurk, Tumblr, Twitter, Bebo, Flickr, AOL email, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Mac.com contacts, and Mail.com contacts. One of Sendible’s greatest assets is the ability to schedule your status updates. You can even send SMS messages right from the site, by purchasing and using SMS credits.

You will, of course, start out with a free account (which will give you zero SMS credits yet allow you to send up to 100 messages and status updates a month) but, there are 4 different types of account upgrade options:

• Pro – $3/month; 25 SMS credits; can post up to 350 messages and status updates a month.
• Online Marketer – $6/month; zero SMS credits; can post up to 1,000 messages and status updates a month.
• Small Business – $9/month; 100 SMS credits; can post up to 2,000 messages and status updates a month.
• Enterprise – $35/month; 250 SMS credits; can post up to 15,000 messages and status updates a month.

Connecting your services is pretty self explanatory. You’ll be prompted to enter your username or email and password. If applicable, you’ll then be asked to select the contacts that you’d like to import from that service. Since a free account will only let you import 300 contacts total, if you want to import anymore you’ll need to upgrade. Because of this, it’s probably a good idea to only import the contacts that you will message the most.

After adding contacts, you can manage them from the “My Contacts” tab. You can see which service they’re connected to you on, edit and/or add the contact information, and delete the contact altogether. For Facebook, you’ll be able to see each contact’s birthday and then schedule messages, wall posts, or reminders for their birthday (no matter how far in advance it may be). This is definitely a very handy feature for those with extremely busy schedules or or just extremely forgetful.

The “New Message” tab is where you can create and send various types of messages. You can create a “Multi” message which is for send a message to multiple contacts at once. You can either send the message at that moment or schedule it for a different date and time. Additionally, you can specify how often you’d like to send the message (only once or every few hours/days/weeks/months). You can also send email messages, which work pretty much the same as the “Multi” message feature except you also have the option to BCC recipients. If you have SMS credits you can send and schedule SMS messages to one or more contacts.

Creating and scheduling status messages is pretty neat; you can choose one or more services to send your status to. There’s also an integrated URL shortener and character counter. Once again you can send the update now or schedule in advance; you can also set how often (if at all) the post reoccurs.

Lastly you can set up reminders to be sent by email or SMS. You can send it right away or schedule it for the future. There is a spot to enter a subject and message; here you can fill in whatever you want. All messages and reminders can be monitored and and edited under the “My Messages” tab.

So as you can see, Sendible is a very powerful messaging and contact management tool. Even though you do have to pay to benefit the most from the service, the plans are decent, affordable, and (in my opinion) very much worth it. Sendible can not only help you be more efficient in your messaging but can also help you keep your social networks updated as well.

Thoughts on Sendible?