Keeping up with Social Media

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Some days ago I found a post in my Google Reader by Duct Tape Marketing‘s John Jantsch in which he explains his social media system.The next day he started asking other social media experts to share their routines and although I’m certainly not an internet guru I still wanted to add my two cents.

Most of you do not only have a website or a blog to maintain but are also members of several social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Stumble Upon, Delicious and others. We use these sites either in a personal way or also more and more to promote and market our business. But keeping up with all the adding, following, messaging and posting takes up a lot of time and you can easily get lost and spend days in front of your screen without doing anything else (believe me I ‘ve been there).

So developing a system might be a very good idea and here is mine:

Usally the first thing I do after getting up is sitting down in front of my PC (still saving for a MacBookPro) and check email, rss feeds, blog comments and messages from my social networks. To make this easier I use Digsby which keeps me up to date on IM, email and social networks messages in my browser status bar. Then I write my blog post (which will  happen more frequently in 2009) and when I am done with all of this I open up Tweetdeck. If I did that before doing any of the other stuff  I’d be lost because Twitter is a true time killer. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Twitter and I have learned more from people on Twitter than I have learned during my entire school years (or at least more useful stuff) but following all the links people post can easily take up hours on end and I have always been the kind of person to do chores first and have fun afterwards (I’m not sure my mom would agree with this though).

There is also something else you should consider to help you with getting the word out about your blog, your art, music or whatever it is you want people to see. After posting a blog post, you want it to go out to your social networks, but doing this manually will consume a lot of time. That is where Friendfeed comes in. If you let Friendfeed import your blog, Twitter, Linkedin etc. you can then let it tweet your updates and also bring it into Facebook with the Friendfeed app available there. If you don’t have a Friendfeed account you can also just use the import service Facebook offers for your Youtube, Picasa, Flickr and some other services.  Then you can sign up for Twitterfeed and let them tweet any rss feed you specify, i.e your Delicious links feed, your MySpace blog posts and of course your blog feed.

To finish this up I have one more tip for you. Try Flock. Never heard about it? Well, it’s a browser, based on Mozilla (just like Firefox), but especially built with social networks in mind. It has a people bar in which you can follow your friends from across several networks, you can upload images to Flickr, Facebook and Myspace by drag and drop and it has a built in option to subscribe to people’s media streams from Flickr, Youtube and other sites and view them in a media stream. You can do all of this from inside the browser without having to find and add different add-ons like in Firefox (although most Firefox plugins also work well in Flock). These are just some of the features, so it might be something you want to check out.

If you have any more tips on how to manage your online social life please share with us in the comments.