When discussing the topic of Social Media with our current or prospective customers we often get the response “I don’t have time for that”. While Social Media is a labor intensive form of marketing, it does provide the personal touch your audience is looking for. Many businesses are unaware that you can actually automate a good portion of your Social Media Marketing.

With a little planning, you can syndicate your online content and reduce the time it takes you to spread your message across all of your social pipelines.

Here are a few tools that can help you do this:

• Tweet Deck (update Twitter and Facebook simultaneously).
• Word Press Twitter Plugin (Display your Tweets on a Word Press Blog)
• Twitter Feed (Automatically feed your blog and other RSS content to Twitter)
• Hoot Suite (for scheduled Tweets and other workflow)
• Posterous - (Allows you to email content and have it distributed to multiple Social Networks Simultaneously. )

Benefits of Social Media Automation:

• Allows marketing staff to spend less time on copying/pasting so they can focus on generating original content and other critical business tasks
• Keeps your content/brand consistent across all social networks.

Negatives of Social Media Automation:

• Can result in neglecting social networks. Make sure you continue to login and build up your following and relationships.
• It may cause you to get labeled as a Spammer or robot. It’s important to comment on the content created by others. Don’t just send your content into the pipeline without participating in other discussions.

Social Media automation can improve your business processes, but remember to use the tools available ethically and build your audience organically.

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Digital marketing spending will increase 17% in 2010 as marketers move dollars away from TV, print and radio advertising to social media, mobile, search and e-mail marketing according to a February report from e-mail service provider ExactTarget and Internet marketing and e-commerce consulting firm Econsultancy.

You may have heard the buzz about Internet Marketing and it’s increasing popularity, but you might not now why the buzz is there. The fact is, Internet marketing provides some significant advantages over traditional marketing.

Advantages of Web Marketing Over Traditional Marketing:

1. Outreach – Internet Marketing allows you to target specific locations on a global scale with ease.
2. Conversion Tracking – Detailed conversion tracking and other metrics such as impressions, clicks, click through rates and cost per acquisition are readily available with Internet Marketing. This data is more difficult to obtain with say a newspaper or print ad.
3. Cost of Entry – With Paid Search or Banner Ads, you can spend as little or as much as you like and can adjust your daily budget at any time.
4. Ease of Deployment – With Internet Marketing, you can deploy your campaign as soon as you are ready and do not have to wait for the next print circulation.
5. Consumer Interest – When you present an ad to someone searching for a product or service, you are catching them in “Buying Mode” which is more conducive to producing a sale or lead.

Offline branding is important, but if you do not consider the Internet as part of your marketing mix, you will miss out on potential customers that your competition may already be capturing.

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