If you have been following my other posts, you now know the basics of Twitter and you also know how RSS feeds work. If you have not read those posts yet, please read those before continuing.

Today, I’m going to show you how to put it all together and automate your social media. These services are not anywhere close to all of the services available for social media. However, these are the ones that I personally use and recommend. Best of all, they are all free for basic accounts.

The first service that you should know about is twitterfeed.com. With twitterfeed.com, you simply link your RSS feed  one time during set up and your status update will automatically post to Twitter, Facebook and a few other services when you update your blog. It’s really slick!

Another great service I use is called Hoot Suite. Hoot Suite offers a little bookmarklet that goes in your Firefox browser window. With Hootsuite, whenever I’m doing my normal internet surfing and I find something useful that could be Tweeted, I press the Hootlet button in Firefox and Tweet out a link to the content in under a minute. With Hoot Suite, you can also schedule your status updates in the future you don’t post too many updates at one time. This is an excellent time management strategy that I highly recommend.

I also use a free service called Social Oomph (formerly known as Tweet Later). Social Oomph actually has quite a bit of services in their free package, but I only focus on one, the automatic direct message. With the automatic direct message, I will automatically send a welcome message to people who are my followers.

There is some controversy brewing as to whether using automated direct welcome messages is a good idea. People who use Twitter a lot pretty much expect that the very first message is going to be an automated one. Personally, I think it’s ok to use it as long as you are not giving a sales pitch. Even giving away something for free can come across as too salesy. Personally, I just say “thanks for following me” and cross promote my Facebook profile. Simple, non threatening messages like that are fine.

Finally, if you really want to go crazy with your social networking, I recommend that you sign up for Ping.fm. Ping.fm allows you to automatically update your status updates on 30 social networking sites all at once. This is a great way to get your links out there and is also great for Search Engine Optimization.

I hope you enjoyed this social media series of posts. If you need any help getting this set up, shoot us an email and we can discuss it.