Is Your Social Networking Sustainable?

Everyone likes the idea of using social networks to build business or raise awareness of an organization.  However, most people don’t like the time involved in having a presence in the most popular social networks.  I am one of those people!  We all have a lot of things to get done and social networking is rarely our highest priority.  So how can we leverage social networking without sacrificing a lot of time?  Set a sustainable content funnel to maximize content across social networks.

Here is a common business approach to social networking:

• I’ve heard people can generate business through sites like facebook, twitter, linkedIn, etc.
• I signed up for all of them and created a profile referencing my website.
• I try to keep up with content on all the sites.
• I’m falling behind on checking the sites.
• I used to have an account on those sites but they don’t generate any business so I quit

The problem with this approach is that it’s too time intensive.  Few people have enough time available to adequately keep updates flowing over multiple social networking sites. For those that have the time or make the time, congratulations, that is the ideal way to handle social networking.  For anyone who struggles to keep entries current, a content funnel can be a life saver.  It provides frequent updates but funnels all sites to a single content source. 

What’s the source?  You’re reading my single source right now, it’s my blog.  All my profiles get updated with new blog posts and direct people here.  So I write my post once, update my profiles and I’m done.  You don’t necessarily need a blog.  Facebook provides ample areas to make posts (either through a blog or on the wall) that people can funnel to.  The only concern here is making sure that your profile is accessible to all, so that people don’t have to bother with befriending you to see content.

So here’s my funneled approach to social networking:

• Create a single source for frequent content updates (blog, dedicated website section, open social network page)
• Create a profile for the sites you’d like a profile on
• Update those pages with links to your single content source when something new appears.
• Reply to responses from the single content source and/or from the social networking sites.

This model provides most of the benefits of social networking sites without an overwhelming time commitment.