Getting Practical with Social Media

One of the raps on social media is that it can be very time consuming.

You can manage this down side with a practical marketing strategy and the right tools.

For example, you can drive more people to your content by letting people know about it via LinkedIn and MySpace and Flickr.

The problem is that going from Facebook to Twitter to Plaxo and the rest is not only time-consuming, it can become a metrics nightmare. Which comment on which network drove which visitors to your blog?

Enter ping.fm. Once you sign up for this free service, you can update your status (or highlight your brilliant blog post) on all of your social networks with a single click.

Even better, if you link to your newsletter or blog post, it tracks all the clicks on the link and reports them to you by network. So, you know how many clicks you got from twitter, facebook, etc.

I used the service yesterday to broadcast my latest blog post.

It got the highest number of hits in a single day any blog post of mine has ever had.

Now that's practical marketing.