Social media choices are vast and it can be a bit confusing in a busy life as to where to concentrate your efforts and which technology to use.

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Can I suggest a four pronged approach.

1) Start a Facebook page that is separate from your personal account. Form relationships through groups that discuss work/business issues you are interested in. If you are in sales for example find the appropriate sales or marketing groups to join with a view to making a contribution and of course networking. Do some research on relevant topics and add value to the groups by posting useful articles to your timeline.

2) Start a Twitter stream and only tweet on your professional interest. Be careful with the name you set up with. If you are say a graphic designer, try to get that fact in your Twitter name. e.g. BillsGraphicDesign For research on your topics you can use “Google Alerts”, this can take much of the hard work out of the research for your tweets.

3) Write a blog. Warning writing a blog is lots of work and if you can’t consistently write on a topic you’re passionate about don’t start. As a bare minimum you will need to post one 600 word article a week. Again you can use Google to do your research. For your blog WordPress seems to have a little more credibility however Blogger (blogspot) can have ads and activity can be monitored through Google.

4) Build your profile on Linkedin and again join discussion groups and befriend others in your area of expertise or in similar careers.

You can automatically link/publish both your blogs and twitter streams to Facebook and your Linkedin profiles.

Finally what programs/widgets to use. This of course is primarily for Twitter and Facebook. I suggest you use Tweet Deck to manage your posts and TweetAdder3 to manage your audience/followers. I also recommend you start with both programs from day one. One is free and the one advertised above and below has a free demo to try it out.

If you are in business, or work for one and you need to communicate (and we all do) best watch the video.

It won’t take you long however if you still think social media is a bit of a fad you may be in for a major of a shock.

Any serious business that is not also serious about its social media activities will not compete in the future.

Remember as the futurist Joel Barker said, “when there is a paradigm shift we all go back to zero” and if you or your company don’t believe there has been a paradigm shift and refuse leave the safe harbour of your past marketing communication methods you may as well go back to believing that the earth really is flat and just rot at anchor.

If you need help in this area contact Ric

Ric (orglearn) While you’re here take a look at the free blank resume form!

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