In fact, just last week Twitter announced it’s own monetizing strategy, which includes paid tweets from major companies.  Facebook has been doing this for years already, and the same with MySpace, but it’s the first for Twitter and assuming it’s successful, more will follow.

Knowing that there is so much effort and dollars going into social strategies, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on some tips that can make management these social network profiles much easier.

To begin with, there are tools to help do social marketing. Some are free, some cost money, and typically the free versions give limited tools while providing upgrades to more lucrative tools that would be helpful.  The key is to find what works for you and stick with it. If you can get all you need from a free service like TweetBeep, than you are good to go. However, for those that want more or need to get more of the data, the pro versions and paid tools come in very handy.

Social Monitoring and Social Marketing Tools:

• Ping.fm – This is a great tool and allows a person to create one account, and socialize to all the top social networks with just one click. This is a must have for anyone that has more than one social network.  Did I mention that this is FREE.
• SocialOomph – This is a must have tool for people using Twitter.  This tool helps to schedule tweets, set up recurring tweets, monitor @ replies, and a ton of other things right from one control panel. They have a free version which gives limited tools and the pro version that provides everything under the sun.
• FriendFeed – This is a free services that allows a person to aggregate all of their social feeds into one account and makes it public for others to join and see. This is a good tool to have and allows for people to find your social links and networking much easier.
• TweetBeep – This is a free service that allows people to track certain keywords on Twitter and sends them an email when it is used. Good for brand terms or following a certain trend.
• FlowTown – This is not a free service, but one that has a lot of value. You can give this service a list of emails and it will build a social graph from it showing which social sites those emails appear on. This is great in figuring out where to spend more time to generate customers.

Although these are just a few tools, there are many more and I’d like to see what others are using as well. Please feel free to share your thoughts about these services or other ones that might be good as well.

I’ve been using social sites for the past couple of years now, and find them very useful in my daily life.  Yes, I’m one of those people that one would be called a twitter-holic, or Facebook fiend, but in truth I get more information and stay current with more things than I ever got from traditional media and networks.  In the past, the I would use newspaper and television to get my current news, but today I can use my social networks to see what things are making news at that very moment and the ones that matter most to me.  However, I find that many social sites don’t have the ability to weed out irrelevant content, but some have found ways to keep the most relevant content upfront.

In order to truly take advantage of these networks I think it’s a good idea to exchange one’s ideas freely across the networks at the same time.  What this will do is make each site more relevant by making the content the driving force for one’s social persona.  This means that because I’ve got all of my sites linked together I think twice before posting something that I don’t think is somewhat relevant or useful to the majority of people in my network, versus just socializing things because they are there.  For example, I have a Digg, account, but I’ve got my Digg feed linked up to my Friendfeed, which posts to my Twitter, and then goes to my Facebook.  This means every time I dig a post or article, every person in my network chain will know about it.  I used to just dig anything I fancied, but now I think twice before I dig something and only mark the things that are really relevant.  In turn, this is making the Digg site better, as well as the other sites in my network chain.

This can be done across many networks, and there are various services and apps that can help generate this type of social networking without any programming knowledge.   By doing so, I think we’ll be socializing with more relevance, and in turn making the social sites more relevant.  Sites that I like to use include Digg, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Myspace, Buzz, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Technorati, TwitterFeed, Ning, and Mahalo.  There are many, many others, but each can be linked together and they should all support each other.  This makes socializing easy and fun, and also makes people think about what they are putting out and will generate more relevant feedback for it.