subject: How To Manage Multiple Social Media Profiles [print this page] With so many social networking and social bookmarking sites available today, it's not surprising that people find is difficult to manage their social media accounts. While an individual wants to have a presence on many of these different sites, it can be time-consuming to update the status and profiles on each site. This is especially difficult if you also use blogs, social bookmarking sites and instant messaging platforms to promote yourself or your brand.
With a little effort, the job of maintaining multiple profiles can be less dreary, leaving up with free time to better connect with other people. These steps are:
1. Understand your Current Position
The first step is to know exactly that where one has a social media profile and where one does not. This can be done by checking with Check User Names, which will search dozens of popular social media websites to see if your username is active.
It is always important to keep a note of other people using your most common username. To make sure that people dont confuse you for somebody else is necessary for friends and potential employers both.
2. Choose Your Platforms Realistically
The next step is to sign up for the most popular social networks no matter whether you are going to use them or not. This prevents someone else being mistaken for you and protects an account that you may want to use later.
At the same time this doesnt mean that you should be active on all of these services. Take look at all of the services available and your time constraints and choose the ones that intrigue your interest the most.
3. Organize
This is the most important step. The person should not be satisfied with a disarray of bookmarks and email notifications. Organize a bookmarks folder or two for the social media services you are using. Filter your email so that all of your notifications fall into their own inbox/label. Schedule time to log into these accounts and make sure they are in order.
4. Automate and Combine Your Profiles
One of the most common actions on social media is sending an update that you have updated your blog. Normally, you would have to copy and paste this type of message into Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.
Here are ten free social media management tools that can help one manage many social networking and bookmarking accounts and also save time by aggregating the updates that is publishing one update across multiple social sites.
Ping.fm
Ping.fm is a free online service that one can use to post a single message across more than 40 social networking sites and it is easy to use.
Posterous
It is a free online service that can save bloggers a lot of time. Posterous updates multiple social networks and blogs, but all you have to do is e-mail your update to post @ posterous.com, include any media and links you want inserted and Posterous will push that content out for you.
Retaggr
Retaggr is an online service that acts as a central location for all your personal information and provides a public gateway to all your online profiles and social networking accounts. Retaggr is not a social aggregator, but rather a social profile management tool.
Flock
It is a Mozilla-powered "social Web browser" that can be used to publish updates across your multiple social media profiles and accounts. The Flock browser supports a number of social media sites including Bebo, Digg, Gmail, Facebook, YouTube, and others.
Friendbinder
It is an online service that lets you keep track of all your friends in one place, and can post updates and replies from within Friendbinder.
Atomkeep
It is a relatively new online service that sends your social updates to a number of social networking sites with a single mouse click. Atomkeep is a social aggregator that keeps all your social accounts in sync.
DandyID
DandyID is a profile management service that lets you add your info (name and ID) from more than 300 social networking and media sites.
AddThis
AddThis is a tool that can help increase exposure to your blog posts or Web articles by giving your readers one-click access to share your content with their friends on social networking and social bookmarking sites.
FriendFeed
FriendFeed is used to share and discuss the interesting things you (and your friends) discover online.
TwitterFeed
Twitter and blogs are a powerful combination and the free online service, TwitterFeed will automatically feed your blog updates to Twitter, Laconica, Ping.fm, or HelloTxt.
Go Forth and Network!
Once youre organized and understand where you really want to spend your time, social media management becomes less of a chore and more about sharing experiences, discovering new content, and building new relationships.
