Social Media & Personal Branding Tools

My purpose in Social Media is quite simple. To establish meaningful relationships, brand myself as a marketing professional, and to make a profit. My greatest fear in all of this is the general amount of time I can waste in all the social media networks. So, my purpose in this article is to share with you the best tools that I have found to accomplish these; my three goals without wasting time.

Ping.fm – Twitter has shown us the power of connecting with large groups of people and sending out consistent updates with meaningful information. Ping.fm is a tool that allows you to send out a “Tweet” from the Ping.fm website that will be automatically posted into your update on your twitter profile, your facebook status, your myspace, plaxo, blogger, linkedin, yahoo, plurk, and 30 other services that you can choose from. This is a sort of one stop status update shop. Send the message once and all of your contacts on all of your social networks will get the update.

TubeMogul – One of the Medias of Social Networking is Video. YouTube does get the most traffic of any video portal site but as long as you are going to put videos on YouTube why wouldn’t you submit them to other sites as well? TubeMogul is the one stop video upload stop. From here you can upload a video and have it submitted to youtube, dailymotion, yahoo, google video, myspace video, and many more. You can also track each video on each site to get feedback on their success.

Mobile Internet – What I mean by mobile internet is internet from your mobile phone. This will be money well spent on a decent phone as well as an internet/data plan for it. There are three reasons why having legitimate (meaning a real browser) internet on your cell phone will increase your social media productivity.

1 It’s the way of the future and it’s also the path to creating time freedom. It’s hard to enjoy life when you are tied to your computer desk. Mobile Internet means a level of freedom!

2 You will always have access to your networks. You can reply to people’s requests & messages faster, you can send out updates from anywhere. Most social network sites have nice mobile versions of their website that make it easy to stay up to speed. Thus you will increase the amount of value you can provide to your networks while optimizing your usage of the value they provide you.

3 You are much less likely to waste time in the social media sites when browsing from your cell phone. It is not nearly as fun to play Facebook’s MobWars on your cell phone and therefore you won’t do it.

Fring – Fring is one of several mobile IM applications that are available for Blackberry, WM, and iphone devices. Fring is my favorite thus far. (Should you not like it or prefer a different program I can also suggest Nimbuzz & Iskoot) If you have followed my advice above you will understand that I’m all about utilizing mobile devices. With that having been said I like to be available to my skype, google talk, msn, and other IM friends when they need me. So I take all of these messaging programs mobile on my cell. I can receive & send IM messages and receive call & make outgoing calls using my skype credit. All of this via the internet on my phone; not the cell minutes. This means that even when I travel internationally I can make calls from my cell anywhere I can get a wifi connection. That is cool!

TweetLater – If you have a large following on Twitter or if you plan on it I would advise getting a free account at Tweetlater.com Their service has several cool features. Here are some of them:

1 Set it up to automatically follow people who follow you. I hate Twitter Snobs (people who want to be followed but aren’t willing to follow) and this way you will be guaranteed not to be one.

2 Schedule Tweets. If you know you are going to be unavailable you can schedule tweets for a certain time of a certain day. This can also be useful to tweet about a specific event such as a webcast that you want people to know about.

3 Auto-Reply. If you have a lot of people following you each day you can set up the service to send people a custom thanks for following me message.

BudURL – If you like to provide value to people by sending them links to articles, services, and more than I suggest getting a free or paid account at budurl.com This service will shorten long urls (much like tinyurl.com) but it will also track the number and type of people that click on that url. Very Cool!

Google Alerts – Want to keep track of your personal brand? Want to know what people are saying about your business, website, or service? Go to google.com/alerts and put in any keyword that you want to follow. Google will email you a list of all the new content that has appeared online with that keyword in the time period you a lot. (I do mine daily).

Depending on what your purposes are in Social Media I would encourage you to take a look at the way you are utilizing these social networks and the way they are providing or consuming value in your life. Create a strategy to spend less time and be more effective in your Social Networking.

Jacob S. Paulsen