I just spent about 15 minutes of my day using a service called UnTweet, what does this service do?  It allows you to review your twitter account and filter out users that haven’t posted a tweet in a certian number of days.  You can choose the amount of days, I choose 90 and discovered a total of 269 different users that have posted anything to their twitter account.

So this got me to to thinking…

When is social marketing too much?

The Scream by Edward Munch

We live in a time where information is thrown at us in so many ways and at a speed that you need to be super human to keep up, so how do you manage all of the this information?  How do you take everything that is presented to you in a day and process what is important and what isn’t.

Truth?  You can’t.

There is now way one person can manage all of the information, reports, blog posts, youtube videos, free-teleseminar recordings, facebook comments, twitter micro-blogs, emails and now google buzz.

Okay fine, so what can I do about it?

You have a few options, you can choose to disconnect completely, you can choose to automate (not a good option), you can choose to delegate (works for somethings, but not everything), or your can choose to get selective.

My Choice?

I choose to get selective.

So how do I do this?  I pick where I want to spend my time on social media and try my darndest to do that well, versus spreading myself out too thinly and do nothing very well.  Social media like any other marketing requires focus, determination, consistency and a plan.  Yes, diving in and learning social media is a good thing, but then once you’ve spent some time checking out everything to do with social media take a breather.  Sit back for a few days, turn off all of your social media access.  Yes!  That means no twitter, no facebook, no linkedin, no YouTube nothing.  Take sometime to get clear on how the idea of social marketing can impact you and your business.

Some things to consider:

• Social media like any other marketing adventure requires a plan, with goals and outcomes.  If you work with a virtual assistant brainstorm with them on how social marketing can impact your business and what is the best approach.  If you are part of a mastermind group, ask to make social media the focus of one of your calls, brainstorm with the members on how each of you can make an impact using social media.
• Be consistent. Just like any traditional marketing program or anything you choose to try out  you need to make a commitment to it and be consistent.  Don’t think that you’re going to see immediate results. Layout a plan that help you build up your presence and commit to doing it for 60, 90, 120 days or longer.  Then each month review the results and see if you are getting the results you seek.  You can expect to have turn around in just days, things simply don’t work that way.
• Be choosy. I’m a firm believer that you are better off doing a few things really well, than to try and spread yourself out over all of the various social media areas and expect amazing results.  In my opinion for someone new to the whole concept of social media marketing, initially stick with some of the big guns – build a blog, create a fan page on Facebook, and  professionally connect on Linkedin.  Yes, I left twitter of my newbie recommendation.  It all comes down to the sense of overwhelm and if you take on too much at once you’re not going to want to manage any of it.

No matter what kind of marketing plan you wish to implement, some early planning can help you keep you on track and focused towards your ultimate goal.  If you are looking for help in building a social media plan, add a comment or leave me a question and I’d love to offer some insight.

As many of you know I’m a fan of Hootsuite, I love the flexibility, customization, and the ability to embed columns from Hootsuite on a website or blog.  I came across some great videos that talk about some of the great features of the Hootsuite service.  Once aspect that I absolutely love is if you are a Chrome Fan you can set up Hootsuite as an application striaight to your desktop (if you’d like a step by step video on how to do this then leave a comment and I’ll create one.

Otherwise here’s a view videos to give you some ideas on how you can use Hootsuite to manager many aspects of your social networking.

Overview of HootSuite

Posting Directly from HootSuite to WordPress!

This is a feature I haven’t had much time to try out yet, but since I use WordPress for both my sites and many of my clients I love this idea….

Great summary of some of the key books about social media…

Thanks to Mashable and Steve Cunningham

Watching this video by Gary Vanerchuk got me thinking about how sometimes we simply don’t react fast enough because we might be afraid to, or we don’t have the answers, or we simply think we know what the best way is  to react to something.  I work with my clients as if their business is my business because simply – their success is my success – I wouldn’t be here doing what I do if I don’t support my clients in the best way possible.

What does that mean for a virtual assistant or online business manager?  I think it means we need to monitor our clients audience and react to what is happening the blogsphere, twitterland and facebook.  We need to step in and react on behalf our clients ensuring that when whatever service or product our client is promoting is first and foremost in the minds of our clients audience.

What do you think?  Watch the video and leave me a comment and let me know I’d be interested in hearing your response.

I found this great blog about community building, Community Guy Jake McKee, Jake’s business partner, Sean O’Driscoll talks about social, ROI, and other genius points. Interesting….grab a coffee and take a break, worth watching.

If you’re anything like me you have a variety of blogs that you follow, some prefer to receive the updates via email while others (myself included) have a preference to use a feed reader. I find if I receive the updates by email they tend to get lost in the myriad of other emails I receive and I say I’ll back to read it later but very rarely to I actually follow through.

I discovered recently a new option that makes the idea of reading the blogs I follow something I actually want to do. The service is called Feedly.

feedly organizes your favorite sites into a fun, magazine-like start page.
based on Google Reader and Twitter.

from Feedly.com home page

If you currently use Google Reader as your preferred RSS reader then this is a snap.  You quickly create yourself an account with Feedly (it’s free) and your set.

Depending on which web browser you use you can download and extension (for Chrome) or Add-on for Firefox that makes it simple to access the Feedly reader.

What makes it so cool, you receive your feeds in a nice magazine format, makes it quick to sort through and it makes it easy to read.  If you want to share what you are reading there direct access for all of the common formats.

This picture below gives you an idea of the digest format of the feedly system.

My opinion worth checking out!