The #1 complaint I’ve been hearing about social media is that people are are overwhelmed, overworked and very, very concerned about how to monetize the enormous effort they’re putting into social media marketing. They want to find ways to utilize the powerful networks that can be created but still have time to create whatever it is they are selling.
In terms of monetizing, one way to think of social media is as publicity for your product or service. Traditionally publicity is used to create awareness and then demonstrate to new listeners the specific, compelling reasons to purchase that product or service. Publicity is judged on media impressions delivered and publicists keep track of the viewer and reader numbers to conclude the number of media impressions. The impressions delivered in social media can be astronomical. But the time it takes to effectively spread a brand message on social media can also consume a disproportionate amount of your time and keep you from creating and delivering additional products and services—which is how you actually make money.
As a single employee company and an early adopter of Twitter and an avid Facebook fan page user and blogger, I have fallen into that time trap, too. But I’ve learned some nifty time saving strategies over the years that are helping me get back to creating income and spend fewer hours spreading the message.
Here are a few of my favorite time saving strategies in hopes that they can help you, too, get back to the business of your business.
- Hootsuite is a great way to organizer for all of my Twitter accounts and my Facebook accounts. I can schedule tweets and posts there during a short morning session.
- Friendfeed automatically sends my posts to a wide variety of social sites every time I post to my blog.
- I love the Networked Blogs app on Facebook and use it to automatically pull my blog posts into my Fan page.
- I use the Selective Tweets application on my Facebook Fan page to feed out my Facebook page posts to Twitter with a link back to my page.
- On LinkedIn my blog posts are pulled in and posted to my profile automatically using the Bloglink application.
- I use the Power Twitter application from Mozilla which works with my Firefox browser and puts a link shortener right above the posting space on my Twitter profile. This allows me to shorten links without having to go to another site to find a shortener.
There are many more and I’ll share those in the coming weeks. As you can see, my time saving strategies help me maximize the use of any content I create by helping me share everything I write with the widest possible audience. This helps me put that saved time back to work that actually creates income.
What are your favorite time saving strategies for using social media to create conversations about you or your brand? Let’s share them here. I’d love to compile a list of everyone’s best practices all in one place so we can all benefit from each other’s experience.
