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subject: 3 Simple Ways to Automate Your Social Media Marketing [print this page]

There have been massive changes in the marketing industry in the last year, none quite as pervasive as the rise of Social Media as a marketing medium and as a way to earn higher rankings in searches. While multiple debates continue to rage on about its ultimate usefulness, there are some accepted truths. Social Media is about conversation, not conversion, and it is very time consuming. Now, even though phone companies, banks and other large organisations would have us believe otherwise, there is no way to automate a conversation. However, luckily there are ways to shave some time off of some of the repetitious tasks that are involved in creating and maintaining a Social Media presence.

Use Programs that Work Together Delicious and Twitter are excellent examples of this. If theres a news story, or a sale, that I want to put on twitter, but also spread out on the Social Bookmarking sites, I use Delicious. When you create a Delicious bookmark you can set it to simultaneously send out a Tweet on the same topic with the URL automatically shortened thanks to bit.ly. Its a great way to hit two birds with one stone. And yes, that was a Twitter pun. Automatically Schedule Your Releases A big part of maintaining a high profile online is to regularly generate new content. In the warp-speed paced world of Twitter and Facebook, this gets exhausting pretty fast. An easier way to manage this is to use Hootsuite to write a weeks, or even a months, worth of tweets and schedule them to be released daily. This is just one small facet of everything that Hootsuite can do, by the way. Unfortunately, no similar program exists for Facebook (that I am aware of). Use One Program to Check Your Web Presence These days, if you want an online presence you have to have a Blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook account, a Squidoo lens, you have to comment on other peoples accounts, tweets, and blogs, as well as add respond to your own comments, etc, etc. Its a lot of work, and it can quickly become overwhelming just trying to keep track of all the conversations going on at once. Fortunately, there are programs like Social Mention. The people who came up with this one deserve to be canonised. Social Mention can run a highly-refineable search through the entire Social Media Jungle and report back with every little post or tweet that has your search term in it.

3 Simple Ways to Automate Your Social Media Marketing

By: Jon Meier

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