You keep hearing about the power of social networking…how it can help you get your message out, get you new clients and JV partners, build stronger relationships with your audience and increase your income. But…and it’s a BIG BUT…who’s got time to keep track of all those sites and IDs and profiles and friends and…oh geez…nevermind.

Well, procrastinate no more, my friend – here are some tips to make social networking work for you:

1. Choose 1-3 social networking sites to use. There are dozens of social networking sites available, and they all have their own personalities, purposes and target user bases. Choose 1-3 that are a good fit for you and what you do to start out. You can always add more later if you wish.

2. Use the same picture of yourself on all of your profiles. Yes, a real picture of you is best. Social networking is a person-to-person endeavor, so don’t use your company logo as your profile pic or avatar. People aren’t going to network with your company – they’re going to network with YOU. The one exception to this is if you have a logo (like I do) that is a caricature of you. My logo is a cartoon version of me wearing “WordPress glasses”.

3. Be social! You are more than just your business, so let that shine through in your social networking interactions. Let a bit of your life outside your business be known – it makes you more ‘real’ to the people you’re connecting with and that’s very engaging. For example, I’ve Tweeted before that I’m counting the days until my kids go back to school. Trust me – every other single, work-at-home mom that read that Tweet could identify with me! How much to share is up to you, but do share more than your business.

4. Network! Hook people up with other people, cool tools and resources. Believe it or not, I’m an introvert through and through. At in-person networking events, I’m the girl who’d be on the periphery of the crowd just watching the people, listening and learning. I am not the one who’d march up to you and introduce myself. I can do it, but it depletes my energy in a serious way. But social networking online affords me a way to connect and introduce myself without the energy drain of being in a crowd of people. I’ve met some wonderful people this way, and some of them have become clients!

5. Give to Get! Make a daily habit of being helpful. Take 5-10 minutes to connect and see who you can help today. Answer a question, provide a link to a cool tool or resource, recommend someone else to someone. You make a great first impression, you become known as a valuable, helpful resource, and you get the feel-good of helping others – can’t beat that combination!

6. Automate to Leverage Your Time and Extend Your Reach. One of the best ways to leverage your social networking time is to automate what you can. I urge you to be judicious about this, but there are some things that make no difference whether you’re doing it by hand or a little program is doing it for you. For example, I have automated the process of spreading my new blog posts throughout the social networks I use. When I post something new here, it automatically gets Tweeted, added to Facebook, added to Linked In, and added to Plaxo. I’m saving myself at least 15 minutes per post because I don’t have to go login to each of those networks and manually post my new blog post. There’s no valuable interaction lost by my doing that, but it saves me a good chunk of time and extends the reach of each post.

7. Create Special Social Network Landing Pages at Your Own Site In a previous post, I recommended you create landing pages for your social media identities. This is another way to accelerate the “know, like and trust” factor in the relationships you build online. It’s the little things like this that make a big difference.

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