I’ve recently mentored a few clients in how best to use Social Networking sites to promote their own business or website and I couldn’t help feeling by the end of each session that the client felt a little overwhelmed by either the amount of sites that needed to be updated or the perceived level of technical expertise and amount of time required to get things moving on each site. I’d like to try simplify things here.
The basic rule of thumb or modus operandi for me with all these Social Networking sites is as follows:
- Register a FREE account (Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Friendfeed, MySpace, Bebo, etc are all free to use),
- Add some relevant profile information and be sure to add a link to your web address somewhere,
- Find some of your existing friends on the site and connect to them,
- Find contact in your market area by searching for related keywords and connect to them also,
- Import dynamic content (Articles, RSS feeds etc..) from your main site or blog to each site using site applications or widgets.
It’s the importing of content from 1 central location (preferably your own site) that makes these things manageable and apart from the initial profile setup on each site and networking you shouldn’t have to visit each site too often.
Within your Facebook, Linkedin, etc.. accounts there should be some section where you can add an application to your profile, so look for any RSS, Twitter or Blogging applications and add these to your home page. Then, whenever you write an article on your site/blog or Twitter, it goes straight into your social networking profile automatically, saving you some time!
Some of these networking sites can also communicate with each other so check out the settings in each.
Some applications I use and recommend are:
Facebook -“Simply RSS” and “Twitter”
Linkedin – “WordPress”
MySpace – “RSS Reader” and “iTwitter”
Bebo – “Twitter”
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