For those that haven’t heard, Ping.fm is a great tool that allows you to post to multiple Social networks and Blog services at once. So instead of say, updating your Facebook status, then logging in to Twitter and updating there you can do it all at once. (and more, but we will get to that later) Check out the full tutorial after the jump. Note: Ping.fm has recently added some juicy new features so we’ve updated the fourth section of this tutorial so be sure to check it out.

Ping.fm is currently in private beta which means that you’ll have to snag an invite someplace. (It seems that I have a few invite codes, so if you want to sign up use the code “pingsauce” and you should be able to register, at least while they last).
1. Register.

Assuming you’ve got your invite code in hand, mosey over to https://ping.fm/signup/ and fill out the form.

2. Hook up to your Social Networks
(the output)

After you register you will be taken to the dashboard for the first time. You will notice a list of common social networks and microblogs on the left. To hook Ping.fm up to one of your other services, click on it in the list and provide the prompted information.

If you decide to set up ping.fm so that you can update your Facebook Status from it, you will need to install the Ping.fm Facebook app on your Facebook page. Again, pretty straight forward, just follow the prompts. Once you install the app on Facebook you will also be able use Ping.fm right from your Facebook page if you desire.

Which brings us to the beauty of Ping.fm:

3.Setting up your Services
(your input)

Ping.fm lets you post from many different inputs, as you can see here. Right now I am going to set up a googlechat bot so I can post from my email interface.

We will talk about the custom triggers a bit later on, but for now lets’ add the google bot! To set it up, click the “google talk” link and then hop over to google chat and add “pingdotfm@gmail.com” to your buddy list. In the web interface for Google I ended up having to go in and make a new contact with that address before it would show up.

If you have trouble getting it to show up in your web based buddy list after you add it, try logging out and back in after you add him. Also, you might need to start type the name of the bot in the search box above your buddy list and then select “Show in chat list” before it works.

Oddly enough, I had to actually EMAIL the bot before he showed up. This may have something to do with how Web-base Gchat hides contacts you don’t email or talk to often, but I’m not certain, but it seems to be an issue with Gchat and not Ping.fm. If logging back in doesn’t do it for you, try this as workaround.

Once you establish a connection with the bot, message it with the authorization code that you where given, and you will be ready to rock!

Now, everything you type to the Ping.fm bot gets posted to the places you set up in the first step! How cool is that? But what if you want to have more control over where you send things? Ah, but that’s the beauty of the next feature:

4. Triggers
(what goes where)

As a character from one of my favorite movies said “you can’t stop the signal” (ten points if you can name the movie). Well, in this case it turns out you can stop the signal, or at least direct where it goes more precisely. Ping.fm lets you do this with triggers.

Click on the trigger link at the bottom of the services/tools list.It should bring you to the following screen.

You will notice that Ping.fm now asks you to select a ‘Method’ when creating a trigger. What is this, you ask? Methods allow you to specify what sort of post you are making. The three options are, Status Updates, Micro-Blog and Blog Post. This feature makes it possible to update only your status messages across all your networks, or post a blog article to all your blogs without posting to your Microblog at the same time for example.

Let’s say for this example I want to update my status messages across several networks. I simply select the “Status” Method and create my trigger.

The next screen will let you choose from your available social networks. When you set up a particular service from the dashboard, you have an opportunity to specify what methods you want that service to be a part of, so if the network you want to post to isn’t showing up, double check that the appropriate boxes are checked.

What I think is the best feature of this whole thing is that you can select multiple outputs, so for instance I could have one trigger that updates Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, and another that only updates Livejournal and Blogger.

5. Posting

Let’s say I want to update all my blog services at once using the default trigger. Here is what that would look like:

@b Here’s the Title to My Post^Here’s the body of my blog’s post.

As you can see, the “^” is used to separate the Post title from the body of the post and the “@b” is the default trigger for the Blog posting method.

The default trigger for status updates is: “@s” , so if I wanted to hit up all my status messages at once I would just prefix my text like this:

@s Is writing a tutorial.

Well, that’s all for now. If anyone has any questions/comments feel free to post em!