A growing number of people use social media personally and for business, some just a little bit and others seemingly all the time. Others have no use for social media at all.
Do you know what these three categories of social media users and non-users have in common? They think maintaining an active social media presence takes too much time.
While non-users may also question the value or use of social media, even avid proponents of social media's increasing marketing force are concerned about the time it takes to plan, create, and post content.
The good news is you can significantly cut or at least control the time it takes to post a lot of content on multiple social media sites.
There are three primary methods you can use to multiply your social media impact:
1. Schedule your postings -- You don't always have to post content immediately. With many sites such as blogs your can schedule postings in the future. In some cases when the social media site doesn't have post scheduling you can use third party utilities for the same purpose. At first controlling the posting schedule may not seem to be a great time savings because you still have to create each post, but if you can create a batch of content at one time for posting over a later period of time, the efficient time management can be a great benefit.
2. Use multi-site posting utilities -- There are a growing number of third party utilities that enable you to create a single post that is then simultaneously posted to multiple social media sites and on blogs and web sites. For example, I currently use Ping.fm to simultaneously post anywhere from four to six entries on Facebook, Twitter, LinkIn, Plaxo, and MySpace every morning. Ping.fm also supports other social media sites but those are the ones to which I currently post.
3. Use RSS feeds -- With RSS feeding, the full definition and use of is beyond this tip guide, you can set up your blog content to automatically post on other sites, including web sites and social media. When I post on my personal blog all or part of the headline and a link to that blog are automatically picked up by Facebook and Twitter - a setting I made within my blogging program. If you have multiple blogs or websites you can also set them to feed content from one to the other.
You could spend most of your time keeping info on your web site, blog, and all your social media sites current - though it would be hard to stay in business. You could also spend money on third parties who will post on sites for you (using your content or content they create). Alternately, the three techniques in this tip can save you lots of time, increase your social media presence, and give you greater control of your schedule.
