How much time have you already wasted with social networking and not actually achieved anything? If your answer to this question is anything like mine then it is probably something along the lines of an awful lot.

I\’ve struggled to see the value of social networking for business but I\’m now starting to see the light and I\’m finding that a combination of strategies is starting to have an effect. One thing is for sure however and that is it can suck up a lot of time without realizing it. The strategies are diametrically opposed but in order to get the most out of my efforts I have to say that it works.

The first point the scatter-gun approach and that is to make sure that you are getting the best output for the minimum input. In other words, whatever you write, whether it be a post to your blog, a page on your website or a Tweet, each and every one of these must populate every social networking platform that you are signed up to.

There are a number of tools that can help you do this and I\’m assuming that you already have an RSS system on your website. RSS or “really simple syndication” allows you to publish content to other simply by the click of a button. It uses a technology called XML that allows other websites to access your content automatically with links back to your site. This is a win win because the receiving sites get fresh updates regularly so improving the dynamism of their sites and any new traffic that this generates, a proportion of it will come back to your site.

How do I know that this works? Quite simply if I write a new page for my website and I hit the RSS button I can check the number of page views and guaranteed it will be somewhere between 5% and 10% of the total page views on that day and when you consider that I have over 700 pages you can see that it\’s a tremendous impact.

That\’s the concept, how do you do it? Frankly I haven\’t a clue, all I know is it works and it\’s one of the most valuable tools that I have and I would strongly suggest that if you are looking to start a website that you find a website building system that incorporates RSS technology.

Once at this stage you can register your XML feed with Google Feedburner which is a great tool that allows you yo connect your feed with the most popular of the social networking Twitter, and from there all my Tweets are automatically posted to Facebook and LinkedIn using a service called Twitterfeed. Both Feedburner and Twitterfeed are free to use.

So that\’s the scatter-gun approach to getting your message out there, the second approach is that of focus and target and this applies primarily to Twitter and that is to ensure that your activities here are directly focused on your niche market. Yes it sounds great to be able to tell your mates that you have 10,000 followers on Twitter but other than massaging your ego, does it actually achieve anything?

Getting followers on Twitter is about finding other Twitter accounts that are in your niche and it\’s worth spending time finding the right pieces of software that can help you do this. There are some Twitter tools out there that frankly aren\’t worth what they are trying to charge you but others do actually work. At least by doing it this way you know that when you do engage in further conversation with someone on Twitter that they are in your target market.

So in summary, fire your message out there to as many people as you can, then close in using Twitter to build relationships within your niche and use the technology that\’s available to do it otherwise you\’ll quickly waste a lot of time and achieve nothing.

Author Bio: Paul Yates offers free Twitter marketing advice. He has researched many Twitter tools to find Twitter friend adder software that works and found only one that works satisfactorily.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: social networking,business social networking,social networking productivity,networking productivity