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.

Also, you know how Freddie (btw, MailChimp’s full name is Frederick von Chimpenheimer the IVth) talks to you while you’re using the app? A lot of those one-liners came from our own customers, from all over the world.

We’ve actually had a lot of success getting our customers to submit funny one-liners, so we’re going to try this again with a fun Halloween promotion…

Tell us what Vampire Freddie should say

Just go to mailchimp.com/halloween and submit a little Halloween related “Freddie Witticism.”

Even if you don’t want to participate, it’s worth checking out our Halloween landing page just to watch the slightly disturbing video our creative team came up with. Here’s a snapshot:

Hey, it’s for Halloween.

Anyway, on October 23rd, we’ll pick our two favorites, and put them into the MailChimp app.

If we pick yours, we’ll send you a ginormous MailChimp plushie (in trick-or-treating costume):

We’ve commissioned DarcyArts (check out her Etsy page) to build these limited edition Halloween chimps.

She’s the same artist who created our normal MailChimp plushies:

but these will be wearing spooky little Halloween masks.

Note: These things are huge. I’m talking virtually actual chimp sized. I’ve got one of Darcy’s original prototypes at home, and I will admit that it sometimes scares the bejeezus outta me at night. So yeah, it would be very effective to keep one of these on your desk at work to ward off evil managers.

So yesterday, we had a t-shirt packing party where the whole company folded and packed.

Even our Unicorn intern pitched in…

Everybody grab some shirts and envelopes…

A handful of them were packed with personal notes on business cards (”send help”), stickers, pins, etc.

Co-founder Dan Kurzius, always “Seeking Efficiences^TM,” with his assembly line system:

Steve. When he’s not packing sketchbooks at night, he’s packing t-shirts by day.

James and Ron from DesignLab, and Jenny from accounting:

Jennifer, head of application documentation, thinking about writing a knowledge base article on folding tshirts:

Mark from marketing. He setup by the catering to sneak some extra servings. Yeah, we saw you Mark.

Some engineers even snuck out of their caves* to help:

(naw, there aren’t any caves here)

Siiigh. Our new Unicorn intern has no idea where to begin.

When all was said and done, we got about 700 t-shirts packed! So all you winners, keep an eye on your inbox (the non-email version) for your super cool and comfy MailChimp t-shirts!

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:

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, and Tony Robbins will both be keynote speakers at the event. Other presenters will be covering a range of topics, from branding to social gaming, tweeting celebrities and beyond. We definitely look forward to stuffing our brains full of new and interesting information and are also excited about meeting some of our users on the west coast. If you’re in the area and want to say hi, just give us a shout.

As MailChimp’s list of social media features continues growing, it seems only natural for us to attend the Twitter Conference. Especially with our new Twitter Template and our recent research showing that Twitter is being used more frequently than Facebook in email marketing. Oh, and you also know that you can track tweets and re-tweets about your email campaigns in your MailChimp dashboard, right? Hey, and don’t forget about our built-in integration with Twitter and other social sites, mmkay?

In honor of our Forever Free plan, we’re giving away 1,000 MailChimp T-shirts between now and the end of September! These are all new, very comfortable and they feature the original Jon Hicks MailChimp sketch.

All you have to do is stay tuned to our Twitter feed and Facebook updates for a chance to win. As soon as you see the link posted in either of these locations, it means that the T-shirt form is live. Just give us some basic contact info, and your shirt size of course, and we’ll get your new favorite T-shirt in the mail in no time!

It doesn’t matter where in the world you’re located, we will gladly send you a shirt. We love international chimps too!

And in case there’s any confusion, this offer does not include chimp arm covers, bananas, or our models Leif and Stephanie. Oh, and no purchase necessary. Because then it wouldn’t be free.

So we’re going to be expanding it to Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11am and 4pm (ET). Raul, one of our customer service ninjas here at MailChimp, also hosts the webinars in Spanish.

See the full webinar schedule here and if you can’t make it, try our online video podcast.

* | MC:SHARE | *

When placed, it inserted a large row of social sites that your readers could share your newsletters with. One request we started receiving immediately after launching this was the ability to specify individual social sites (not all of them at once).

You can do that now. Here’s how…

* | SHARE:SITE_NAME1,SITE_NAME2 | *

for example if you only want digg in your email footer, you’d do this:

* | SHARE:digg | *

If you’d prefer 4 icons:

* | SHARE:facebook,twitter,myspace,digg | *, etc.

(note: I’ve added extra spaces to the merge tags in this blog post so that they render correctly for our RSS-to-Email subscribers. If you copy and paste from this post, the merge tags will not work.)

MailChimp provides a one-click feature for subscribers to share their completed email campaigns via the primary social networks. Currently 9% of campaigns (roughly 90 million emails) are shared via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon, or Delicious.

To begin, you need to make sure that you have two things: 1. a Facebook fan page, and 2. the HTML code from MailChimp that allows you to embed your sign-up form on a web page.

Step 1. Grab your MailChimp list’s embed code

In your MailChimp Dashboard, click on the Lists tab. Then click on “forms” for the list that you want the subscribes to go to.

Then you’ll select “integration code” from the top menu, which will present you with a link to the Signup Form Embed Code. From here, you’ll simply want to copy the embed code and paste it into TextEdit or NotePad.

Step 2. Add the Static FBML Application

FBML stands for Facebook Markup Language. At its core, FBML allows you to embed your application in the Facebook platform. It isn’t quite HTML, but it isn’t quite proprietary either. (Jesse Farmer provides a great introduction to FBML if you’re interested in reading more.) The easiest way to add the application is to search for “Static FBML” using the upper right hand search box on Facebook. It’ll show up as the second search result, and you need to click on “add to page”.

Step 3. Create the Newsletter Signup Tab

Navigate back over to your fan page and select “edit page” from right below your profile picture.

Scroll down to find FBML in your list of applications, and click on the little pencil icon to edit it.

In “Box Title” you can give the tab a name like “Email Signup” or “Newsletter”. Then in the “FBML” section, you’ll paste in the embed code that you copied from MailChimp in Step 1. It’s easy to style your form using basic HTML to give it a look and feel that matches your brand. One suggestion that Return on Subscriber makes (and we agree with wholeheartedly) is adding the following customization:

<form method=”post” action=”http://url.com” TARGET=”_blank”>

at the end of the url to open a new browser tab or window. This is nice thing to do for your user so they can easily find their way back to the page they were originally browsing.

Step 4. Add a New Tab to Your Fan Page Top Navigation Bar

Go back to your fan page and select “edit page” from directly below your profile picture. Then scroll down to find FBML in your list of applications, and click on the little pencil icon to edit it once again. This time you want to select “Application Settings”.

From the Application Settings, you’ll have the option to select whether you want your signup form to appear as a box (in the manner of Fans, Notes, or Favorite Pages), a top navigation tab, or both. As you can see on the MailChimp Fan Page, we have our signup form set up as both a box and a tab. This is a matter of individual preference and will not affect the functionality of the form.

And that’s it! If you have questions, thoughts or suggestions on innovative ways to use this, please leave a comment and let us know!