Backing up your social media information is helpful for personal use and a no brainer for any business with an active social presence! Not only is backing up your information simple, and many times free…it will save you time when trying to locate information you’ve previously shared or better yet – let you restore your entire network if your information were to be lost.
The content your business publishes and shares on social media sites lives on the “cloud,” and if any of those services or sites were to crash, your business could lose everything – content, fans, followers, comments and connections!
Imagine if your business Twitter account(s) were suspended (it happens more often than you know), deleted or disappeared entirely. What would you do if your entire LinkedIn network suddenly disappeared? If your business Facebook Fan page was no longer accessible?
When Twitter goes down your follower list and the people you follow completely disappears. Both numbers reset to0. If you haven’t backed up those lists, you have lost not only your customers but also your brand ambassadors.
The good news…backing up your businesses social media accounts can save time, stress and potentially lost business, plus it’s simple and in most cases, costs nothing!
Following are five of the best information-packed articles (complete with excerpts) that I’ve found to date on tools and ways to secure your online presence:
13 Tools to Back Up Your Social Media Content
BackupMyTweets: A service that provides daily tweet backups and allows you to view all of your tweets on one web page, or download in HTML, XML or JSON.
Tweetake: A tool to back-up your followers, people you are following and tweets.
TweetBackup: A tool to export and backup your tweets and friends list.”
HOW TO: Back Up Your Social Media Presence
“We’re coming pretty close to living our lives on Facebook – it’s our photo album, diary and mailbox, all in one – so why leave all that info up to the whims of the all-mighty servers? This October, the social network got hip to data portability after it started allowing users to download their profiles – photos, statuses, updates, videos and all.
The process is really too simple to forgo. Here’s how you can stow away your social life for safekeeping: 1). Go to Account Settings, 2). Click on “Download Your Information” and allow Facebook to download your info, 3). Wait for an e-mail that will let you know your info is ready (it takes a while, what with all the stuff you probably have on Facebook), 4). Go through the security test that allows you to download your info (kudos on that one, Facebook), and, voila, your profile is ported to your desktop in a nifty folder.”
How to Back Up Your Social Media Accounts
“There are two main services that have dominated the space in terms of financing and user-base. Many companies in this space are called point solutions, or specialize in backing up an individual service. But Backupify.com and SocialSafe.net are the most comprehensive options.”
3 Ways to Back up Your Social Media Lifestream
“At the core of all the social networks is an RSS feed. Your Twitter account should have an RSS feed at the bottom of the page, or on the sidebar to the right. There should also be another one for your replies and for favourites so you can choose which ones you wish to back up. Similarly, there are RSS feeds for your blog, your Flickr page, even your Last FM account These RSS feeds are the key to the most basic backups you can do.”
How to Backup Your Social Media Life
“…LinkedIn doesn’t offer a one-click export feature like Facebook does, but you can manually export the two most important parts of your LinkedIn life: your connections and your profile.
To back up LinkedIn contacts, click on “My Connections” and then click “Export Connections.” Choose either an Outlook-friendly CSV file or a Mac Address book-compatible VCF file. To save your LinkedIn profile data, click on “Edit Profile” and then click the PDF icon on the right sidebar to export it to PDF. You can also use Backupify to archive your LinkedIn data automatically.”
Have you backed-up your social media accounts? How often do you do it? What are your favorite tools or suggestions?
