Social Media Guide

Social Media Guide: free up your time and automate your online promotions.

Learn how to free up your time by automating all your online promotions, links and messages. By using Twitter to communicate with your customers, you can plan your promotions and messages months in advance. This frees up the time you would have spent each week updating your Twitter account.

1. Sign up for a Twitter.com account if you don’t already have one. You’ll need to build up your followers (people that follow your messages on Twitter) or integrate your Twitter account onto your website in order for people to benefit from the messages you post on Twitter.
2. Sign up for a Hootsuite account at http://hootsuite.com
3. Add your Twitter account to Hootsuite.
4. You can also add your Facebook, Facebook page, LinkedIn, Ping, Wordpress and MySpace accounts to Hootsuite if you want to schedule messages for these as well.
5. Once you have added all your desired accounts, type a message in the status message box at the top of the Dashboard and click ‘Send Later’:
6. You can send the message out on any day in the future. For example, if you’ve got a big product launch coming up or an anniversary, or if you just want to schedule a tweet once a week or once a day. You can even specify the time of day it’s sent out. So, you could schedule several messages in one day - all at different times.

Hootsuite also gives you the option of reminding you when you are sending a message out – just tick the box that says ‘Alert me by email when message is sent’.

So instead of spending valuable time on social networking websites every day, use Hootsuite to schedule and plan all your promotional messages at the right times. You’re less likely to forget to post messages at the right time because you would have already done it in advance, and you don’t have to worry about updating social networks in between the bulk updates you schedule via Hootsuite.

For more tips on how to make the most of social media visit www.e-blueprint.co.uk