In the previous post we outlined a few things to consider when choosing social networks to participate in. Now that you’ve made your choices, it is time to manage them.
Step 2: Managing Your Social Networks
To start, you’ll have to manually add all of your profile information. You can begin with the basics and fill each of these out over a period of time. Ideally, you want to be updating all of your social profiles about once a month. As you get involved with each social network you will see what type of profile information is necessary to attract the best relationships.
Try making a spreadsheet of all your social networks. Your column headers should be the social network name and URL, your user name, password and finally, the last date of update. It will help you stay on track of all of your profiles.
TIP: Be sure your profiles are similar on each network you choose to participate in. People are leery of chameleons who have a different “facade” in each community. Also, I think it is important to get connected to services that essentially become “profile aggregators” like Disqus, Gravatar, BackType and coComment. These services collect your various presences, show how actively and intelligently your social participate is and are quickly becoming important as credibility tools.
Now, here are some tools you can use to help automate some of your social networking, but be careful not to overuse (and certainly not ABUSE) these tools.
If you’re into viral videos or video updates, Tubemogul is a great tool. After inputting your login information for the corresponding sites, Tubemogul lets you submit a video once and it will then load your video on to sites like YouTube, AOL Video, MySpace TV, Blip.tv and more. Yes, it’s free.
Twitterfeed.com lets you syndicate RSS feeds through Twitter. It can be your blog’s RSS feed or other feeds you think your Twitter F & F’s would find interesting.
Ping.fm makes it easy to update your status on multiple social networking sites at once. Adding status updates on your LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc many times a day could take you hours – Ping.fm takes just seconds for each update. You can update by phone, by email, even schedule updates with your email client like Outlook. Hellotxt.com is a similar service.
FriendFeed is gaining in popularity, even with some mainstream Internet users. The site basically consolidates all of your social networking accounts and turns them into one feed that users can subscribe to or you can feed back into other sites (like your Facebook account) in the form of a feed or a profile widget. In that sense, FriendFeed is similar to the “profile aggregators” mentioned above. There is some overlap with Twitter but FriendFeed has enough stand alone features that it is worth consideration.
The Final Word
Avoid social networking burnout by refining your lists of social network profiles to a manageable number that you can update regularly. Also, be careful not to “hook” too many social networks together and accidentally become a big social spam engine where one update triple-posts Twitter and Facebook making your friends & followers think you have social network OCD.
We welcome your patent-pending strategies or clever business models for getting the word out, promoting your posts or yourself, why not share in the comments below!
Nice article, Mike. I was thinking about this a bit ago and wrote about it too. FYI: http://www.mikemoran.com/biznology/archives/2008/12/using_twitter_to_reach_nirvana_1.html Your final word is a wise one; people new to social networking should be wary of overexposing their networks to their feeds & posts.
Mike, great post! I would add that everyone should encourage readers to promote their posts for them by including bookmarking buttons and twitter IDs in the comments. (see above)