4 Time-Saving Tips for Social Media Marketing

What’s the least you should be doing to extend the reach of your online content marketing through social media sites?

This is a good question because many of my readers are busy professionals running a business who don’t have a lot of time. The big danger of sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn is that they can suck you in and spit you out hours later. … and time is money.

Even when you’re connecting and having a good time, you can spend time that isn’t productive. …Sometimes it’s hard to know if it’s time well spent or just a good time.

So for those of you who want the bare minimum effort and time, and still get results, here are a few tips I suggest. I’ll remind you I’m not a social media marketing expert, so please feel free to join in and add other tips in the comments section.

I will tell you I’ve gotten clients directly from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, so I must be doing something right.

If you don’t want to mess with this stuff, ask a VA to help. There are plenty of people available, some expensive, some not. It’s time-consuming to set up your accounts, write your profiles and get your blog posts to automatically feed to each site. Hiring someone to do this for you makes sense, because you are freeing up your brain-space for more creative and challenging work.

#1 Time-saving tip for social media marketing: Automatically feed your blog posts into your social media site accounts. You’d be surprised the number of people who tell me they are manually updating their social sites with excerpts from their blog.

If you do nothing else but automate this, you’ll start to drive traffic back to your blog from these sites and reach many more readers.

If you don’t have them feeding automatically, you could use Ping.fm. This free site will allow you to post a blog update to several social sites at a time.

#2 Time-saving tip, for Twitter: Besides driving traffic back to your blog, you want to follow up with comments and status updates that are in your field, that mention the keywords you’re an expert in. In other words, you want to follow the conversations and jump in when there’s an opportunity.

There are a number of Twitter tools. I recommend using SocialOomph.com which used to be known as TweetLater. Set up keyword alerts so that you get an email update listing tweets that mention the keywords you want to follow, including your name and Twitter name. Another way to do this is with TweetDeck.

#3 Tip, for Using LinkedIn: LinkedIn is highly valued for it’s predominance of business-minded people. You can ask a question and get valuable input to help create blog posts while at the same time connecting with people in your field.

Another key usage is to join specialty groups and add to their discussions with short blurbs and a link back to your blog. This has to be done manually, but it can be outsourced to a VA, as long as you monitor for comments and responses.

#4 Time-Saving Tip: Use a VA. There are many low-fee virtual assistants who now specialize in social media management. Some of them are in India, Mexico, and the Philippines so you can keep your costs low. They can schedule tweets for you at intervals during the day and alert you when you need to respond.

Social media sites are designed to connect and network, so be sure to monitor them. If you’re using a VA, and I recommend it, don’t make the mistake of turning over all your participation to her or him. Nothing turns off people more than realizing they aren’t connecting with you, but a hired gun.

What time-saving tips can you share for extending the reach of your content marketing and blogs through social media?

Hot Tip: NOWCanDoIt.com offers affordable virtual assistant help on a variety of online marketing needs.

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