A Twitter page is displayed on an Apple iPhone in Los Angeles October 13, 2009.MARIO ANZUONI
THE SCENARIO
I'm being encouraged by network colleagues as well as my employer to connect and develop my presence on social media to a higher level and use them professionally. But there are only a finite number of minutes each day that I could devote to what seem to be a daunting number of options. How can I effectively develop a professional presence on the web beyond the basics?
THE ADVICE
Thankfully, it is becoming much easier to connect professionally on a number of social media sites at the same time, which can save hours each week.
Take your best shots
While many social media sites are developing specialized followings, for professional purposes the prime ones are LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. YouTube is increasingly used for visual presentations and video résumés.
If you don't have a presence on all of them, you should set up accounts with your professional profile. At the same time, review all your postings and profiles on any social media site you have used in the past, to clear out unprofessional comments, get rid of questionable photos or comments, and eliminate connections who fill your page with irrelevant and distracting comments.
Multitask the updating
The general principle for adding or changing postings is write once and repurpose automatically. Rather than updating your profile on each site individually, use tools that let you do the changes once and have the revisions changed automatically on all your other social media sites. A simple way to do this is to use a free service, www.Ping.fm. Give it log-in credentials for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter (and other sites), and you can up update your status on all of the sites at once.
Or if you primarily use both Twitter and LinkedIn, you can connect the two so updates from one simultaneously appear on the other. On LinkedIn, go into your account settings, and look for "Twitter settings" to connect the two.
Syndicate your blog posting
What you write in a blog can also appear simultaneously on your Facebook page and your LinkedIn profile. In Facebook, go into the Notes and look for a link called "Edit Import Settings" or "Import a Blog." On LinkedIn, you need to add either the free WordPress or the BlogLink application to the home page. In both cases, you'll need the website address for what is known as the RSS Feed, which should be displayed on your blog (its icon looks like a dot with a couple of eyebrows).
Store your visuals in one place
Instead of uploading videos or pictures to individual social media sites, consider hosting your videos on YouTube and pictures on Flickr, then use the embed codes to pull your pictures in. Doing this will let readers see your pictures and stay on your site rather than being forwarded to another site.
Prioritize your following
If you are more a consumer of information than a creator, use free website tools such as HootSuite, Seesmic, or Tweetdeck to more efficiently follow what is being posted by specific people, companies or industries. It beats logging into each social media site and wading through the all-too-numerous irrelevant postings.
Randall Craig is president of Toronto-based Pinetree Advisors and author of Social Media for Business.