9 items to put in your Social Media toolbox

There are so many social media tools on the market today that it have become common to spend hundreds of hours setting up a social media machine (SM²).  Setting up a  SM² that will work for you 24/7/365 is not a small undertaking, but you can do it.  Answering the following questions will help you to set up your SM² machine.

• What is the purpose of for my SM² -(buying, selling, informational, socializing, marketing) ?
• What message do I want to be on the Internet that represents me?
• What image do I want to project to the world?
• Who do I want to read it?
• Do I want to be connected to them?
• How do I want them to reach me?

Most of the social media tools/systems online are currently free, but just like your television and cable service you only need one company providing the service that you need.  The key to social media (whatever reason you are using it for) is to sprinkle your content/message around the Internet. If you are trying to sell products on the Internet it helps if your content/message is in various media forms/formats (text, audio, photo, music and animation). Think of it as the Hansel and Gretel principle (laying out bread crumbs) except you are set out little bread crumbs to entice users to come to you. It could be a perspective customer, employers, investors, loss family members, etc. Fortunately social media tools allow you to build your SM² this way, you just have to select the right combination of social media tools. Here are some of the leading tools that everyone is using.

Blogger.com

A blog is a weblog and a hierarchy of text, images, media objects and data, arranged chronologically, and that can be viewed in a HTML browswers

YouTube.com

Is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos. 

iTune.com

Tunes is a proprietary digital media player application, used for playing and organizing digital music and video files. The program is also an interface to manage the contents on Apple's popular media players devices.

Google.com

is a multinational public cloud computing, Internet search, and advertising technologies corporation. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit from advertising and AdWords program.

Digg.com

Digg is a social news website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories

LinkedIn.com

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking.  LinkedIn had more than 60 million registered users, spanning more than 200 countries.

Twitter.com

Is a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based post of up to 140 characters 

Facebook.com

Facebook is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. 

Twitpic.com 

Is a website that allows users to easily post pictures to the Twitter microblogging and social media service. Twitpic is often used by citizen journalists to upload and distribute pictures in near real-time as an event is taking place

So there you have it, go ahead and start signing up for these services, use the same photograph/avatar, login ID, email and password for each system,which will help you manage your new SM^2.