Update All of Your Social Networks in One Place

All of this social networking madness can drive your average teen, business owner or blogger into a frenzy when it comes to keeping “status updates” consistent and sharing information that you find online, without having to jump through a thousand hoops to get the job done. Let’s face it just about everyone on the planet has Facebook (over 350,000,000 actually), Twitter has exploded in popularity and everyone has that My Space page that they visit when there is absolutely nothing else that you can think of doing instead.
I am one of those blogging CEO‘s that believes that building an online community is extremely important for growing most blogs, or at least the blogs that most of you are working on at the time. If you plan on having an online community your going to find yourself creating plenty of new profiles at various social networking sites like, Twitter, Facebook, My Space, Friendster, Diigo, and Linkedin to name a few. There are literally hundreds of social networking sites that you can become active on, if you play your cards right and continue to keep things updated and share decent information your online community will continue to grow.

Update All of Your Social Networks in One Place

Ping.fm allows you to post to just about any social network from one simple place, updating your “status updates” and sharing your favorite articles and blog posts couldn’t be any easier than it is when using Ping.fm.

If you take a quick look at the Ping.fm screen shot above you will see an area that I entered my text that would be sent to the list of social networking sites listed on the left, as you can also see in that column you can add more social networks to send your message to once you hit “Ping it”. There seriously has to be at least 100 social networking sites that you can connect with Ping.fm, check out the screen shot below to see a few of the social networks that you can connect with Ping.fm in order to send status updates from one place.

Social Networking Sites

Ping.fm Toolbar Share on All of Your Social Networks

Now that you have an idea of how Ping.fm can make it easy for you to update all of your social networking profiles a snap, while doing it from one very easy to use site, it’s time to show you how easy it is to share your favorite blog posts and whatever else you find on the internet with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Plurk, My Space and whatever other social networking sites you choose.

Once you install the Ping Toolbar on your favorite browser you can share your favorite articles and finds on the internet within seconds, and the best part is whatever you share will be posted to all of your social networking profiles. If you look at the screen shot above you can see the “Ping This” in the toolbar, if your on a blog post or article that you enjoy and want to share simply click the “Ping This” button on the toolbar and within seconds all of your social network profiles will be updated. Your done, no site hopping.

I found Ping.fm thanks to Mike from Daily Shot of Coffee and I haven’t stopped using it since, I don’t use all of the features that Ping has to offer since I have only been using it for about 3 weeks now. I suggest taking a few minutes to check out Ping.fm and see if you find it useful, I posted a few more Ping.fm features below.

Ping.fm Services and Features

• Ability to create “groups” to filter certain messages
• Post from Anywhere >> to Anywhere
• Support for iPhone, iPod Touch, WAP and SMS text messaging
• Yahoo! Messenger
• Google Talk, AIM, Windows Live Messenger and standard email

Aftr you check out Ping.fm take a second to leave a comment and share some feedback with everyone, seeing only my perspective can get old pretty quick.
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Best Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing

Best Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to improve Their Marketing:

1. Add social bookmark links to your most important web pages and/or blog posts to improve sharing.
2. Build blogs and teach conversational marketing and business relationship building techniques.
3. For every video project purchased, ensure there’s an embeddable web version for improved sharing.
4. Learn how tagging and other metadata improve your ability to search and measure the spread of information.
5. Create informational podcasts about a product’s overall space, not just the product.
6. Build community platforms around real communities of shared interest.
7. Help companies participate in existing social networks, and build relationships on their turf.
8. Check out Twitter as a way to show a company’s personality. (Don’t fabricate this).
9. Couple your email newsletter content with additional website content on a blog for improved commenting.
10. Build sentiment measurements, and listen to the larger web for how people are talking about your customer.
11. Learn which bloggers might care about your customer. Learn how to measure their influence.
12. Download the Social Media Press Release (pdf) and at least see what parts you want to take into your traditional press releases.
13. Try out a short series of audio podcasts or video podcasts as content marketing and see how they draw.
14. Build conversation maps for your customers using Technorati.com , Google Blogsearch, Summize, and FriendFeed.
15. Experiment with Flickr and/or YouTube groups to build media for specific events. (Marvel Comics raised my impression of this with their Hulk statue Flickr group).
16. Recommend that your staff start personal blogs on their personal interests, and learn first hand what it feels like, including managing comments, wanting promotion, etc.
17. Map out an integrated project that incorporates a blog, use of commercial social networks, and a face-to-face event to build leads and drive awareness of a product.
18. Start a community group on Facebook or Ning or MySpace or LinkedIn around the space where your customer does business. Example: what Jeremiah Owyang did for Hitachi Data Systems.
19. Experiment with the value of live video like uStream.tv and Mogulus, or Qik on a cell phone.
20. Attend a conference dealing with social media like New Media Expo, BlogWorld Expo, New Marketing Summit (disclosure: I run this one with CrossTech), and dozens and dozens more. (Email me for a calendar).
21. Collect case studies of social media success. Tag them “socialmediacasestudy” in del.icio.us.
22. Interview current social media practitioners. Look for bridges between your methods and theirs.
23. Explore distribution. Can you reach more potential buyers/users/customers on social networks.
24. Don’t forget early social sites like Yahoogroups and Craigslist. They still work remarkably well.
25. Search Summize.com for as much data as you can find in Twitter on your product, your competitors, your space.
26. Practice delivering quality content on your blogs, such that customers feel educated / equipped / informed.
27. Consider the value of hiring a community manager. Could this role improve customer service? Improve customer retention? Promote through word of mouth?
28. Turn your blog into a mobile blog site with Mofuse. Free.
29. Learn what other free tools might work for community building, like MyBlogLog.
30. Ensure you offer the basics on your site, like an email alternative to an RSS subscription. In fact, the more ways you can spread and distribute your content, the better.
31. Investigate whether your product sells better by recommendation versus education, and use either wikis and widgets to help recommend, or videos and podcasts for education.
32. Make WebsiteGrader.com your first stop for understanding the technical quality of a website.
33. Make Compete.com your next stop for understanding a site’s traffic. Then, mash it against competitors’ sites.
34. Learn how not to ask for 40 pieces of demographic data when giving something away for free. Instead, collect little bits over time. Gently.
35. Remember that the people on social networks are all people, have likely been there a while, might know each other, and know that you’re new. Tread gently into new territories. Don’t NOT go. Just go gently.
36. Help customers and prospects connect with you simply on your various networks. Consider a Lijit Wijit or other aggregator widget.
37. Voting mechanisms like those used on Digg.com show your customers you care about which information is useful to them.
38. Track your inbound links and when they come from blogs, be sure to comment on a few posts and build a relationship with the blogger.
39. Find a bunch of bloggers and podcasters whose work you admire, and ask them for opinions on your social media projects. See if you can give them a free sneak peek at something, or some other “you’re special” reward for their time and effort (if it’s material, ask them to disclose it).
40. Learn all you can about how NOT to pitch bloggers. Excellent resource: Susan Getgood.
41. Try out shooting video interviews and video press releases and other bits of video to build more personable relationships. Don’t throw out text, but try adding video.
42. Explore several viewpoints about social media marketing.
43. Women are adding lots of value to social media. Get to know the ones making a difference. (And check out BlogHer as an event to explore).
44. Experiment with different lengths and forms of video. Is entertaining and funny but brief better than longer but more informative? Don’t stop with one attempt. And try more than one hosting platform to test out features.
45. Work with practitioners and media makers to see how they can use their skills to solve your problems. Don’t be afraid to set up pilot programs, instead of diving in head first.
46. People power social media. Learn to believe in the value of people. Sounds hippie, but it’s the key.
47. Spread good ideas far. Reblog them. Bookmark them. Vote them up at social sites. Be a good citizen.
48. Don’t be afraid to fail. Be ready to apologize. Admit when you’ve made a mistake.
49. Re-examine who in the organization might benefit from your social media efforts. Help equip them to learn from your project.
50. Use the same tools you’re trying out externally for internal uses, if that makes sense, and learn about how this technology empowers your business collaboration, too.
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How to use Facebook and other Social Networking Sites to get Referrals or Leads

Social networking is quickly becoming the new thing that people “can’t” live without. With sites like Myspace, Facebook and twitter (among others), it has relatively easy to connect with family, friends and meet new people.
Part of the reason why these sites are so addictive is because they allow real people to connect with each other in a way that was never possible before these sites came on the scene. One of the things I love about these sites is the ability to connect with people I haven’t seen in ages.
Facebook is one of the social networking sites that’s at the forefront of the social networking scene and is one of my favorites. It currently has over 250 million members and that number is increasing significantly on a daily basis. According to Alexa, Facebook is the second most visit website in the world, second only to Google (of course).

Using Facebook to promote your business

Because of the viral nature of sites like Facebook, business are using Facebook to get their messages to the masses and promote their products and services.
The best way to get exposure is to go where the people are, and obviously people are all over Facebook.
There are also many internet marketers that have caught on to the potential of social media, who are starting to focus intensely on promoting whatever they are into using these social media sites.

Facebook for the Freebie Trader

One of the things that Freebie Traders are ALWAYS into is finding ways to get more referrals. Facebook (as well as other social networking sites) are prime candidates for places to get referrals. I was browsing around Facebook the other day and came across a status update that excited me. It was a perfect example of someone using Facebook in an effective way to potentially get referrals for their freebie sites. I immediately took a screenshot, and am posting it here (with her permission of course).

The Perfect Example

As you can see, all she did was mention how much she got paid using Freebie Sites (IFWs) and that got her friends interested. That is extremely effective marketing. If you are a Facebook user and you have friends on there, they connected with you in order to get your status updates (an also for other reasons). If you got paid from a Freebie Site, why not let them know?
Chances are, if they are in a situation similar to you (i.e. needing/wanting to make a little cash), they will be interested in finding out how you (a friend) did it successfully. At that point, you can easily bring them to a place like CaliStyle101, where there is a system in place to facilitate them trading with you. It’s a win-win situation.

Many Marketers get this wrong

I’ve recently started focusing more on using social networking sites to connect with others with the goal of getting exposure to more people and what I’ve noticed is that many internet marketers get it wrong. They hear that twitter and facebook are great for doing business so they jump on there and start tweeting away about there business on twitter or updating there status on facebook to heavily promote themselves.

The Creepy Salesman

The problem with this is that people do NOT come to facebook to be sold to. Quite frankly, I believe that people are tired of all the salespeople trying to get them to buy this and buy that. I know that this is true because I’m one of these persons. My wife and I went to the Alltel store yesterday to buy a cell phone and the lady was trying to get us to buy every accessory in the world and I was getting so tired of hearing her speak that I wanted to leave the store.
People come to these sites to CONNECT with other REAL people and that’s what your goal should be, even if you are hoping to get exposure for your business. Be a real person on there. Tweet about your day, what’s going on in your life or some cool things you found online. Every so often, update your status about a positive aspect of your business (like making $900 online). People will sense that you are genuine and want to know more.

Call To Action

Ok, I’m sure you see the value in using Facebook and how it can help your online business. So what’s next? Well, you I would recommend taking the following steps:

1. Register at Facebook if you haven’t done this already.
2. Add Friends using the tools provided on your Friends Page. It’s very possible that you have already done this and have a ton of friends. If so, you are already ahead of the game.
3. Connect with people and have ongoing conversations. Remember, it’s not about the hard sell. Your goal is really to establish connections and relationships that go beyond your online business.
4. Talk about your successes in your business, but not too much. It’s a part of your life, and the people that are interested enough to connect with you are probably interested to know what’s working for you. There’s no set rule here, but I personally like to do something like 10 non promotional messages for every 1 promotional message.
5. Watch your business grow. If you do the above 4 steps well, you should expect to see an increase in business. Keep doing them over and over and you will see the power of social networking.

Suggestions for comments

As usual, I would love to hear your comments. Here are some suggestions as to what you can say below:

• What you thought about this article
• How using social networking sites have impacted your business
• Questions you may have about using social networking sites
• Strategies you’ve implemented that have had a positive effect on your business

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