Balance social media channels for successful marketing of business

May 10, 2010 (The Augusta Chronicle - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- With so many social media networks out there, it's easy to be overwhelmed when balancing accounts for business.

Here are some tricks for connecting efficiently and in the right way: First, determine which social networks will work for you.

Facebook pages are basic but versatile. You can post events and pictures of new wares and post status updates.

Twitter is another basic social medium that potential customers are using, so you should have a presence there, too.

A new social media network to use is Foursquare. Make sure your business name and address are spelled right and add contact information. You can look at what users are saying about your business and tips people have left for other users to see.

There are other niche social media networks that might work well for your business, but these are the basics.

A common mistake I see businesses make is to link Facebook pages to Twitter. This doesn't work, for several reasons.

First, you're likely not keeping your status update under 140 characters. That means to read the entire status, users will have to click the link at the end. That's an extra step that many won't take on Twitter if they're just doing a scan of tweets.

Unlike adding links, which add value to a tweet, there is nothing more irritating than clicking the link to Facebook to discover there are just two or three words that didn't fit.

Also, if you're just shouting your message rather than interacting with people following or liking your business, you're missing the point.

If you're wanting to save a step, I'd try HootSuite, a free site that will allow you to post to Facebook pages and Twitter accounts at once. It also has a built-in link shortener.

If you have people with social media duties, you can give them different privileges on HootSuite without sharing your log-in information to the site. Also, you can edit access to specific social media accounts you have on Hootsuite. For example, if you have your personal Twitter account added on to HootSuite, you can select just the work account for access privileges.

To see more of The Augusta Chronicle, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://augustachronicle.com. Copyright (c) 2010, The Augusta Chronicle, Ga.

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