Thank you to all who came out last night to the Wedding Party Studio event, I hope that the top 10 tips will help you want to get started on your social media and search engine optimization. I know I talked to a lot of you last night who understood the importance having the nice website, blog, and overall social media campaign, but your biggest concern was having the time to dedicate towards it. So, here’s my advice to help you figure out how to manage it all a little better :

1. Be Selective. There are a TON of social networks (hover over my “Share ” button on the right to see a few of the most popular networks) out there to participate in, so unless you have someone managing your social media for you, you will need to pick what’s right for you. You don’t necessarily need to use Delicious or Digg just because you hear someone else talking about it, if Facebook, Twitter and your blog is all that you can handle that’s better than none at all. If you tried to tackle every social network out there it would become your full time job.
2. Schedule time for social networking. Like anything else in life, you need to schedule time to manage all of your social networks. For me, it seems to work best to try to write up to 5 posts at a time on the weekend and schedule them to go out once a day throughout the week. That way if I stumble upon something interesting or have a picture to share with you I can add it throughout the week. Realistically this doesn’t always happen, you’ll find me up at 5 am writing posts quite often but in any case I like to do it in the morning and give people a chance to read throughout the day.
3. Consider automation. Using tools like Ping.fm or networkedblogs can be very helpful and save you a lot of time. These tools allow you to integrate your social networks so that you can post on one and a automatic post will appear on all of your other networks that you have synced.
4. I can’t say this enough, study your web analytics. Know where your traffic is coming from, this can save you so much time in the long run when you start eliminating or posting less frequently in places that aren’t generating much buzz. But do give it time, don’t stop posting after a month because you’re not seeing much change, people need time to find out about you.

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