• A better interface to display retweets
• Shows Facebook Likes
• Post to Facebook pages
• Import Facebook Likes
• Improved threading of replies from social networks
• Improved Facebook open graph search for responses
• Enable broadcasting by default for new posts
• Complete re-architecture and rewrite to make platform more extensible (easier to add Google+ support, when their API is released)
• Enable broadcasting by default for new posts
• Set which accounts (including pages) are checked by default
• New queue system for checking for social comments on posts
• Better support for shortened URLs
• Delay broadcasting comments to social networks until they have been approved
• Delay broadcasting future posts to social networks until they have been published
• New authentication scheme for improved security
• Smart detection of retweets as understood by humans (where possible)
• Check for social comments via admin bar
• Check for social comments via posts list screen
• Added “time until next check” (in a human friendly format) to the social comments box for each post
• Allow editing of social broadcast messages for scheduled posts
• Directly imported tweets (by URL) are approved immediately (not held for moderation)
• Don’t import private tweets as comments
• Refactored personal vs. global broadcasting accounts, with defaults available for each
• Improved admin UI

We’re pretty excited about this update as it makes a plugin that we already loved even better. Oh, and Social is open source. You can fork it on Github and make your own contributions.

download Social 2.0 for WordPress

Fork Social 2.0 on Github

With a full-blown WordPress blog, in addition to our Facebook Fan Page and Twitter account, you might be wondering why in the world I’d want another site to maintain. The simple answer: the more I use Posterous, the more I love it! — Especially for the particular niche it serves. (more on that after the jump)

I like to think of Posterous as a miniblog– something that gives you greater freedom of expression than Twitter’s 140 characters (known as microblogging), but often is shorter and more sketchy than a fully fleshed out WordPress post. One of my favorite Posterous features is autoposting, which allows you to link any content you send to Posterous with sites like your Facebook page or Twitter stream. The autopost feature currently supports Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Vimeo, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress and Xanga, with more integrations on the way.

For MailChimp, I’ve made the decision to only link Posterous to our Facebook Fan Page. So when I’m finding and adding content, our Facebook Fans are the audience that I generally have in mind.

So you might be wondering: but MailChimp, now that you have over 3,500 Facebook fans, how do you make sure your content is relevant to everyone?

The candid answer is that I don’t. I have to assume that if someone becomes a MailChimp fan, they’re interested in what we have to say. Much like email marketing, becoming a fan is a way of opting-in. In the case of Facebook, this means that someone is electing to receive updates from MailChimp in their home feed. (Side Note: Facebook does give you the option of hiding updates from a particular person or page if you find the number of updates annoying or excessive.)

As far as the content is concerned, often times I’ll post information and photos about what’s going on in our office (chimps are people too, you know!), links to interesting articles about design, small business and entrepreneurship, and even the occasional funny monkey photo.

Two things that have worked well for driving engagement on Facebook (measured in terms of “likes” and comments) by way of Posterous have been 1) making sure to maintain variety in the type of links and content posted, and 2) not treating the Posterous to Facebook autopost feature as “set it and forget it.” How can you expect people to engage with your business or brand– on Facebook, Twitter or your blog– if you don’t maintain an active presence there? I’ve made a habit of consistently responding to what our fans and followers have to say and have noticed a measurable correlation in their level of engagement thanks to Facebook Page Insights. So after posting something to Posterous and properly tagging it (I like to keep things categorized and organized), I head over to Facebook to see what, if anything, our fans are saying about it.

A fan page is it’s own little ecosystem, and it needs to be nurtured and treated that way. This becomes even more important if you’re feeding content into it from auxiliary sources.