We all have the same problems;  not enough hours in the day to do everything we need to ensure our business thrives and with the birth of social media sites like like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn etc the list of daily tasks just gets longer.

I help businesses every day with the set up and management of their social media strategies,  here are some of my tips to help you along your way into the exctiting world of social media:

• Before launching into using social media, first think about  your strategy. No point in launching into using social media if you have no idea who its targeted at and what you want to achieve. Is it greater brand awareness, do you want to promote specific products, promote an action?
• Which sites are your clients using?  Do not launch into anything until you know if your customers are using these sites. The easiest way is to just ask. Why not send them a survey or next time you are speaking to them ask what they are doing on the Internet and make note of each clients response. This will very quickly allow you to gauge which sites will work best for you.  You can also profile your customers by using The Social Technographics Profile, simply input in your customers age profile, gender and location and this nifty tool will show you whether your clients are Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators or Inactive.
• Now that you have decided which social media website to use, the next step is to sync them together. It will depend on which sites you are using but the most popular I come across are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, IGOPeople, YouTube and Flickr.  There are many more and it is normally quite easy to sync them so each time you update one site the update feeds into any others they are synced with it. Every time I update my blog, it feeds into my Facebook page, which updates in Twitter which in turn updates my LinkedIn and IGO People accounts.
• Managing multiple account from one place – use websites like Hootsuite, Ping.fm, TweetDeck to manage multiple accounts and update multiple social media websites from the one platform.  There are many more but these are my favourite. They will certainly save you a lot of time.
• Mobile applications – you should ensure that you are current with your information, nothing worse than seeing posts with old information. If you cannot post from your mobile phone upgrade to a phone that allows you to post while you are on the move,  there are a range of great applications available for all phone types that will enable you manage your social media while on the move.
• Make yourself viral – remember to post things that are of interest to your followers, if they are interested its likely they will pass it onto to their followers and so on. Remember its called “social” media so do not always go in with the hard sell, you should enjoy the interactions as much as your followers do.
• Repeat posting – people are online at different times of the day and may miss your most recent posts, try reposting some (not too many don’t want to look lazy) at different times. Gauge when you get the most interaction from your followers and keep a few minutes aside at this time each day to work on your social media.
• Monitoring – remember to monitor interaction, you don’t want to miss an important comment or question

Happy posting