In Step 2 of Social Media 101, we talked about putting a plan together. It wasn't–and doesn't have to be–elaborate. Far from it. In fact, keeping things simple keeps you from feeling stupid (a variation of the KISS principle–Keep It Simple Stupid).

Social Media 101: Automation

Now that you have all of your social media accounts set up and you've learned how they work, you can move to the next step: Tying it all together. I have spoken about automating this before in the following two articles:

1. An Introduction to Social Media Using Ping.fm and Hootsuite
2. How to Get Dozens of High-Quality Backlinks from a Single Blog Post

Those are pretty detailed posts showing how to automate not only your social media marketing efforts, but also how to syndicate your own blog content to dozens of sites simultaneously.

If you don't want to go to the trouble of doing this yourself (it is a bit complex and does take a lot of time to set up new accounts), I can do it for you for a nominal fee. Simply go to the Internet Marketing Muscle Helpdesk and submit a helpdesk ticket (choose "Consulting" from the menu). Be sure to leave your name, email address, telephone number, and a brief description of what you would like help with (i.e., "set up social media automation").

Note that you will always want to write individual status updates for all your social media sites; you will also want to check in every day to see what's new (complaints, kudos, mentions, etc.). This cannot be automated, but it can be outsourced.

The beauty of automation is that it's scalable–as you add in more social media accounts, your social media marketing efforts multiply. Plus, as an awesome side benefit, you get hundreds of backlinks that help you tremendously with search engine rankings.

Here's that link again:

==> Internet Marketing Muscle Helpdesk