How to look like you’re on Facebook all day while you’re really working

Photo from Dan Lyon’s Blog

I receive a lot of comments from my friends, family, and co-workers about my Facebook usage. The comments are usually in the vicinity of “wow…you sure are on Facebook a lot!” I also get “do you even work?”

Oh…where does a single mom find the time to maintain and develop websites, develop new online services, monitor traffic, blog, watch Woz on Dancing With The Stars, AND be on Facebook all day?

Here’s my coming out post. I have Oompa Lumpas who impersonate me on Facebook. They comment, click “like” on people’s pictures and links every so often, send out links and update my status every five minutes.

Kidding.

Alright. Here goes:

How To Look Like You’re On Facebook All Day When You’re Really Working.

First, you’re going to need some basic equipment. I have a Windows desktop computer at work, a Macbook Pro for my mobile office (aka the kitchen table, the playground, Chuck E Cheese), and my iPhone.

I have quite a few social networking accounts that I have feeding into Facebook, but I do have a few people in mind writing this post, so I will keep it down to my most commonly used accounts: Twitter, and this blog. 

Basically, every time I post on Twitter, it shows up as my Facebook status. You can link up these two accounts by installing the Twitter application on Facebook. 

Now, I use several Twitter clients so that I am not on Twitter all day. I send tweets and monitor the people I’m following from my Windows desktop using Twhirl, from my Macbook Pro using Twitteriffic, which also has an iPhone version that I use. If I’m driving, I use an application called Vlingo, a voice-powered app that allows me to update my Twitter status by speaking, instead of typing. On 3G dead zones, I send text messages to 40404 to update Twitter.

I’ll stop there. My Twitter usage is a post in itself.

To stay visible in my contacts’ Facebook feeds, I have to make sure that content goes in there. An easy source of content is my blog, which is a self-hosted Wordpress blog. To automatically publish my blog posts on Facebook, I use the Wordbook plugin. You can also do this on a Wordpress.com blog by using the Wordpress application on Facebook.

Knowing that my 675 friends on Facebook want to see pictures of my dog or stuff that I did over the weekend, I post a lot of it. The amount of pictures I post on Facebook has some people thinking that I sit around uploading pictures all day. I do this a couple of ways. When I’m outdoors, I usually take a picture, go on the Facebook app on my iPhone, then post it from there. That takes about two seconds, which is not bad if you’re posting one or two pictures. If I have a batch of pictures that I am uploading, I plug in my iPhone or my camera to my Macbook Pro, which automatically opens up iPhoto. I “select all” the pictures from the “last import” and export them using the Facebook exporter for iPhoto. The application takes you to Facebook for approval and that’s it.

Links are also a great way to add content to your Facebook profile. I read the New York Times online and I browse the web using Chrome on Windows and Safari/Firefox on my Mac. All my browsers are equipped with the “Share on Facebook” tab, which allows me to post links and comment on them while I’m browsing. Easy. For all you Mozilla people out there, there’s also an excellent add-on  for Facebook. 

Of course, the real value of Facebook for me is in consuming content that my network shares with me through their feeds. I usually reserve the content consumption for the morning (when I read my news and RSS feeds), at night, and when I’m stuck in traffic. I live and work in Silicon Valley, which means a good portion of my day is spent literally sitting in a non-moving car on this high-performance parking lot we call Highway 101. Commenting, writing on people’s walls, is usually done on my iPhone.

As you can see, you can definitely incorporate your social networking activities into your everyday tasks. With the proper equipment, applications and setup, you too can look like you do nothing but “Facebook all day” while you’re really working.