Do you love networking and connecting with people through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other sites but find that it ends up taking far too much time out of your busy day? Do you wish there were a way you could update all your profiles at once, automatically share your blog content, and make it easier for others to share your website on the social networks? Good news–you can!
Save Time and Update Multiple Sites at One Time
Save time by updating all your networks at once. You can use a tool like ping.fm. I’ve used this site to post notes that then show up on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Or, you can hook your accounts together so they cross post. My Twitter account will post to my Facebook account with Selective Twitter Status if I include #fb at the end of the tweet. Or I can include #li and it will send the tweet to LinkedIn using the sync option in my LinkedIn profile.
Schedule Your Updates in Advance Batches
About once a month I login to my Hootsuite account and setup inspirational quotes or other encouraging tidbits to tweet themselves once a day for the next 30 days (and by including #li and #fb they’ll also show up on Facebook and LinkedIn). This way I stay visible on the social networks even when I don’t login daily.
Automate Your Network Monitoring
You want to stay on top of what’s being said about you on the social networks so you can reply when needed. Use Google Alerts and Tweet Beep to send you an email anytime someone includes your name, business name, or social networking IDs online. That way you don’t have to login and search Twitter or the other sites to see who’s talking to or about you and you can easily reply.
Filter Your Followers and Follower Requests in Groups
My virtual assistant helps me keep up with followers by logging into Tweepler a couple of times a week for me. Tweepler makes it super simple to quickly follow back the people who have followed you without visiting every profile page. You might consider auto-following on Twitter (I’ve chosen not to simply so my profile page doesn’t end up showing inappropriate photos of people I’m “following” when I auto-follow–it’s a pet peeve, and I recognize that for some people auto-follow works well). For other networks process your friend/connection requests in batches once or twice a week and it’ll save you time over logging in daily to process them.
Send Your Blog to Your Profiles Automatically
Using TweetThis or Twitter Tools you can set your blog up to send a tweet when you add a new post. To share your posts on Facebook try the Notes application or NetworkedBlogs. In your LinkedIn profile you can add your blog’s rss feed to have it appear on your page.
Let Your Visitors Share Your Content For You
Thanks to awesome tools like AddToAny and ShareThis, anyone who can copy and paste a snippet of code can add social network sharing options to their website. AddtoAny works great for basic HTML sites. If you’re running your site with WordPress check out the SexyBookmarks or Sociable plugins and also the TweetMeMe button. These will all add a row of social networking icons to the pages of your website so that visitors can just click an icon to share a link to your page with their friends and followers.
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