But what about all the others? FriendFeed, Bebo, Ecademy, Digg, Reddit, Plurk - there are dozens and dozens of others. How many social media platforms should you be on and how do you manage them without it all taking over your life?
Let's answer the challenge of choosing the social media platforms first. It all depends on your business and your social media strategy. If you have a target market then the first step is to establish where they 'hang out' online. Are you more likely to find them in Facebook or LinkedIn (very social or quite businessy)? Initially, stick to the bigger social media platforms; you can always add more later.
Once you've established the best place to find potential clients then you need to active and visible, offering help and getting involved.
My advice is to use Twitter regardless of your market as it's a much broader collection of people and reasonably easy (and quick) to manage.
Next step is to decide what you want to achieve from your social media activity. Without a strategy you'll be putting in lots of effort without a clear idea why. Decide what your outcomes will be, how you'll measure them, how much time you're willing to invest and who will do what. Review this regularly (at least monthly) to see how you're doing.
Now there's the management part - this will take an investment of time to set up, but once it's set up, you'll be able to do a lot in a very short space of time. You'll need to use some of the online tools to do this, but most are free or low cost.
Explore Hootsuite to manage your Twitter, Facebook and Linked In posts and status updates. Generate your tips, knowledge sharing and value that you are prepared to give away and package them into a daily series of posts. If you have enough 'sets you can recycle these each month. This means that one post can be delivered to several different places.
Use Google Alerts to find suitable news items around your subject and share these with your readers. You can use a feed service to automate this so, once you've set it up, you don't need to do much.
Check out Ping.fm. It's a broadcast system that sends one post to each social media platform you've attached to it. It is a one way street - broadcast only, but a great way to improve your reach. You will need to invest time in setting up proper profiles on each of the social media that you attach (there's nothing more off-putting than a profile with no photo or content other than lots of posts), but again, once it's set up, it's done.
There are many more tools that will make staying visible simple without having to work too hard, but these are a great start.
Get started - identify your target market, get your strategy in place, find out where your potential clients are most active and use the tools available to make staying visible and building your reputation easy.
