User love is the best kind of love on a cold winter day. 

Postling gives you handy tools to shorten unwieldy URLs for use in your status posts, but up until now they were all created through Postling's Bit.ly account. At the behest of our users, we’ve made it possible to use your own Bit.ly API key to keep track of all of your shortened URLs within Bit.ly for stat-tracking purposes.

To get set up, all you need to do is visit your Accounts page and click “Bit.ly” to link your account.

Happy shortening!

Last night at Dogpatch Labs (our office space that we share with a dozen other startups) we had an internal demo night, so everyone could get caught up on what the others are doing. Doree Shafrir from New York Magazine was also in attendance, as she is writing an article about the booming NYC tech scene. We volunteered to cook for everyone, and Jon Steinberg took this photo (stolen via his Flickr).

Here was the menu (the chef in charge named moving left to right in the photo):

• Alexis made roasted carrots and asparagus, and was an excellent sous chef.
• Chris made fettucini alfredo with broccoli and red bell peppers.
• I made two dishes: turkey chili (with 2x the spices, 4x the chocolate, plus added chocolate stout beer, chipotle chilis in adobo sauce, and ground beef + ground pork) and chicken curry with cashews. 
• Ice cream for dessert, with the essential toppings: chocolate syrup, maraschino cherries, and whipped cream.

Everything turned out amazing and it was a great night. Looking forward to the next one.

Until today, Postling was simply a great tool for publishing all of your social media content. We let you post, edit, delete, and track the comments on anything you posted through us.

We've taken things a step further -- you will now be able to oversee everything you've posted to all of your social media accounts, regardless of where or how it was originally created.

If you're a single Postling user, this means that all of the posts you make, even those outside of Postling, will be pulled into your dashboard.  Using TweetDeck?  It'll be there.  Does your Facebook status automatically get updated when you update another service?  Now you don't have to worry about it... because it will all be there for you.

Using Postling for your business?  Our new full feed feature provides you with the ultimate collaboration tool for your team and clients.  Account managers will be able to oversee what their clients are posting, while the head of your marketing team can monitor all of the content created by their employees.  This means you can streamline your efforts by being able to track all posts made (regardless of how or where), manage your brands, and monitor mentions and replies in one place.

When you add new social media accounts to Postling, the most recent content will automatically be pulled into your dashboard. If you already have a number of accounts linked up with us, don't worry -- that content is being pulled in as well. You won't have to do any extra work to make use of this new functionality.

This is one of the biggest additions we’ve made to Postling thus far, and we’re just getting warmed up! Let us know what you think in our forums!

We're looking to hire a few interns to help us with marketing and sales. Your responsibilities would include blogger outreach, sales emails, various marketing activities, and community management. You must be well-versed in social media and have excellent written and verbal communication skills. This would be a 3 month unpaid internship with the opportunity to turn into full-time paid employment at the end of the internship.

If you are interested, send email to dave@postling.com with your resume and a link to your blog / twitter / LinkedIn or some other social media page that will let me learn more about you. You'll be working out of our office in Union Square, NYC, so local applicants only, please. Thanks!

I'm delighted to announce that last Friday, five months and 1 week after we launched, we've reached 1000 users! We've also signed up our first PR firm to a premium account, and I'll have more to say about that later this week. Getting to this point has been exciting, and I'd like to share with you a little bit about what's happened in these last 5 months.

We initially launched Postling as a $9/month single user / single brand tool aimed at small businesses. Customers would register, input their credit card information, and then get a 30 day free trial. After a month or so, we looked at our data and spoke with customers and realized that, despite the 30 day free trial, the idea of putting in credit card information to an unfamiliar site was scaring away potential customers. So in our first business model adjustment, we pushed back the credit card requirement to the end of the 30 day trial, meaning now you could sign up for free. 

Our second big adjustment came after I presented Postling to 650 people at the October NY Tech Meetup. After the event, Attention USA's Kristin Maverick came up to me and enthusiastically said that Postling would help the social media team at her social media marketing and PR firm manage their various clients. Wow, great idea! So a few weeks later, we launched the version of Postling you see today, where multiple people can manage multiple brands from a single account. We made the single user version free and offered the multi-user / multi-brand version to agencies and corporations for $250/month for 10 licenses. This freemium model nicely allowed us to continue providing value to small businesses while creating a product that solved a growing problem for agencies and corporations.

And that's where we are today. We've hired a full-time Director of Sales who is starting today (hooray!) as well as a VP of Customers (beginning 1/25). We've moved into sexy new office space graciously provided by Polaris Ventures. We've announced a partnership with Collecta to provide incredible real-time monitoring, which will be available soon. And, by popular demand, we'll be offering individual licenses for $30/month for those who need a license or two but don't need 10. It's not reflected on the site yet, but if you'd like one right now, email me at dave@postling.com and we'll set you up.

A huge Thank You to everyone who has signed up with us, shared the love on their blog, twitter, or facebook, or who has been following along via my personal blog. The next 6 months are going to be even more amazing than the last, and I can't wait! 

“No Spirit! I’ll edit, I swear!”

It’s time for another enhancement! Postling users can now delete any post across all of the services we support. If you’ve created a post and published it out to five blogs, ten Facebook profiles, and sixteen Twitter accounts ( not that we’d condone such an action ), you can un-publish them all simply by clicking “delete” in your dashboard.

We’ve got a handful of management features like this coming down the pipeline, so stay tuned!

We here at Postling are of the opinion that you've got better things to do with your time than obsessively refresh twenty webpages and spend hours scouring cyberspace in search of what the rest of the world is saying about you. Here, let us do it for you.

We've released a Tracking tool that automatically monitors what other people are saying about you and your brand. We currently track Facebook wall posts, Twitter mentions, and reviews on Citysearch and Yelp. This is just the beginning; we plan on adding many more sources. Let us know what else you’d like to see!

To get started, all you have to do is log into Postling and click the Tracking tab. We’ll handle the rest.
 

Today we’ve released two features on Postling that address some of the requests we’ve received on our forums.

Postling now enables you to post to specific categories on any of your Wordpress blogs. When you select a Wordpress account as a publishing destination, a drop-menu containing all its existing categories will automatically appear beneath it. All you have to do is select the categories you'd like, and we’ll do the rest.

We’ve also added Drupal blogs as a publishing destination, so you can now post blog entries, images, and links to Drupal.

Enjoy these updates, and have a happy holiday!
 

We've given Postling a visual overhaul to help facilitate some of the most-requested features you've been clamoring for!

Postling users can now create multiple logins for their accounts, allowing them to share partial or total control of the services they manage on the site. Each login can be assigned its own set of permissions, allowing you to restrict access on a granular level. If you want to given your intern access to updating the company Twitter account but not its Wordpress blog, you can do exactly that.

Another addition is the ability to group social media accounts by brand. By creating a brand, you'll be able to manage all of the content for a specified group of accounts quickly and easily. Postling allows you to filter both outgoing posts and incoming comments by brand so you can quickly see the content that matters.

We hope these additions make Postling even more useful for you and your business. We're actively using the suggestions of our intrepid users as a roadmap, so keep them coming!