Socialable Home / Social Media Marketing / How well connected are you?

How well connected are you?

If you’ve discovered social media as a great tool to get your message out to a much larger audience and understand the importance of engaging with people rather than selling at them – then you’ve taken the first two critical steps.

If you’re active you’ll find your network is growing. If you’re using more than one platform (and it’s good to do that) your networks are multiplying. The problem is that if you have an active business you can spend hours online catching up with all your networks. What you need are tools to manage it all – and they’re out there.

At basic level you’ve got things like www.ping.fm and www.onlywire.com – both are distribution networks and enable you to spread your blog links and short comments across a wide range of networks. Ping connects with 32 and Onlywire with 42 – with some overlaps.

It takes time to set all this up, but it’s a one-time activity, once you’re connected you can post to all your networks in just a couple of clicks. However, this is a one way street – you can post, but can’t see what’s going on in your account on those networks.

There are a couple of tools that are excellent for managing and posting to your networks. One is Tweetdeck, which is a downloadable application; the other is Hootsuite, which is an online service. Whilst Hootsuite was launched later than Tweetdeck it quickly passed it in functionality, leaving Tweetdeck playing ‘catch up’. The big advantage of Hootsuite is that you can access it anywhere, on any computer – as long as you can remember your passwords.

It allows you to connect to and manage up to 5 social media sites (including Ping.fm) as a free user. This means that you can post to Twitter, Facebook, your Facebook page (business or community page), LinkedIn and others from one place and also see the status updates of your contacts.

You can connect to Twitter and LinkedIn via Facebook and pretty much all the leading social media offer connection options. The danger is posting in one place and creating a chain effect where your message pings all round your social media as one sets off another. Not all social media sites filter incoming posts and just post the same thing again and again.

If you want to get control of your connection network my advice would be to draw yourself a little map and choose where to post and where it goes from there.

Getting control of your connections means you can post once and your reach is global!

Lesley Morrissey is Lesleywriter! Offering expert advice on written communication and readability. Lesley has a unique expertise in making the words and pictures really work, particularly on the web. Learn more about Lesley here www.lesleywriter.com

Bio
Twitter
Facebook
Google+
Latest Posts

Lilach

Founder at Socialable Ltd

Lilach Bullock is passionate about getting tangible results using social media. Listed in Forbes as one of the top 20 women social media power influencers. She's the co-author of "Images that Influence" (Number One in its category on Amazon). Lilach is consulted by journalists and regularly quoted in newspapers on social media related matters, including (Forbes, Social Media Today, Prima Magazine, The Sunday Times and BBC Radio 5 Live ). A keynote speaker at business and marketing seminars. If you want excellent results, more business and better visibility you can can subscribe to Socialable newsletter here.

@

Couldn't fetch latest tweet.

Follow @

+Lilach

Latest posts by Lilach (see all)

Google+ new features: hit or miss? - May 17, 2013
101 of the Best Mobile Apps 2013 - May 15, 2013
10 ways to promote an infographic - May 14, 2013

Buffer

5 crazy ways to get Buyers to your website

Enter your name and email address below now for instant access to the free ebook - 5 Crazy Ways to Get Buyers to your Website!

Subscribe and give yourself an unfair advantage!