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.

We’re giving away one registration, and all you have to do is leave a comment on this post telling us why we should pick you! Of course you’ll still be responsible for your hotel and travel expenses, but we’ll make sure you can get into the only industry-wide trade show for the blogging and new media communities. You’ll have up to 24 hours, or until there are 150 comments on this post– whichever comes first– to convince us you’re the person most deserving of the free registration. The winner will be announced late on Tuesday afternoon, and we’ll contact you via email. (So make sure you use a valid email address when you comment on this post.)

And of course, if you’ll be attending Blogworld October 15-17 or just happen to live in Las Vegas, don’t forget to find Chief Twitter Officer Amanda and say hello. She’ll have a limited number of MailChimp tshirts, stickers and pins to give away. Keep an eye on the MailChimp Twitter feed as well as our Facebook page for more details during the conference.

–UPDATE–

We’ve selected a winner! Congratulations to Joe Wunderlick of Wundercreative. He charmed us with this pic of Freddie:

P.J. Fusco, over at the Clickz network, offers up Five Getting-Started Blog Questions.

I’ve always felt blogs and email newsletters go hand in hand. I post full articles on our blog, then write snippets in my newsletters that point back to those articles. It’s easy, and it’s great for search engines.

It took me a while to figure this blogging stuff out, so I thought I’d post a few tips of my own to any small business owner thinking about entering the exciting, fast-paced world of blogging…

Back in 2004, I didn’t want to bug our programmers to setup a blog for me. Besides, I had no idea if a blog would even help us. So I started up a TypePad account. It was external from our website (which didn’t help me in the SEO department) but it was cheap, easy, and it worked. It took me 2 years to “get into the groove” of blogging, and build up a significant amount of traffic. The traffic got some good attention for our company. More importantly, it built up great connections with other people in the email industry. Anyway, we just recently moved our blog from TypePad over to our own website, using WordPress. I absolutely love WordPress, and highly recommend it. My tips for people thinking about starting up a blog:

1. Throw your hat over the fence, and just get started with TypePad. Do it now. Later, you may want to migrate your content to your own website. It’s not that hard, so don’t let that slow you down.
2. Set expectations really low. Takes a long time to get into the groove of blogging.
3. Keep posts fairly quick and “lite.” Writing 5 page essays will lead to burnout fast. You can do a few of those later, when you actually have readers.
4. If all else fails, just write stuff with bulletpoints. Like I’m doing right now.
5. Be opinionated (which can be funny, or serious, or technical). Just show us your personality.
6. Make friends with other bloggers.
7. Use it in conjunction with email marketing (hey, I had to throw that in) because it makes you blog and send newsletters together. Like peanut butter and chocolate!

Hope that’s helpful.