Today, competing services hellotxt and Ping.fm both introduced features that let Facebook administrators update Facebook Pages. The pages, which also include the new Public Profiles introduced after the latest Facebook revamp, let companies or individuals promote businesses, products, or even public personas using a page that’s similar to the standard user profiles.
Of the two services, hellotxt has been around the longest, having been founded in 2007. At the time, they were one of the first companies to address the need of updating your status on multiple social networks without having to log in individually to each one. Today, they support over 40 social networks and microblogging services (by our count, 55, as of now).
The new Facebook Page updating feature at hellotxt, available here, lets page admins post messages, photos, or video links to the Wall of different pages. They’ve actually implemented this feature in a clever way that should appeal to admins who have to keep up multiple pages as they let you tag your networks and Pages with keywords. That way, when you need to update a particular set of networks, you can prepend your update with the pound sign (#) followed by the keyword in order to update just that one particular group.
Ping.fm, the newer of the two services, has also implemented Facebook Page updates and tagging. However, in their case, they don’t support tagging as a workflow timesaving feature for categorizing posts, but rather as a methodology for inserting hashtags into your posts – such as what would be used on Twitter, for example. They also support “mood tagging” on networks that support it and have added in a feature for posting songs courtesy of Grooveshark.
The process of setting up your Facebook Pages on Ping.fm is a bit more involved, too. Where hellotxt simply has you add a Facebook application, Ping.fm makes you go off an get an application key which has to be copied and pasted into a box before you can access your Facebook settings. Once there, it’s not even clear if they’ve correctly identified your page or if those settings refer to your user profile instead.
For the individual, Ping.fm will probably suffice in most cases, but it’s clear that hellotxt is the service to choose if your job involves updating multiple sets of social networks or Pages.
