Don’t waste time setting up a profile on every new social media site that pops up; instead, focus on the social sites that are built to last: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Once you have mastered to art of monetizing your products and/or services through these sites, you can implement your strategy on the other ones.

To begin, you need a social headquarters– a blog. The goal is to build relationships through Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and then drive the traffic to your blog (your base camp).

Using Facebook, you can create a page for your company. Your customers and even your prospects that use Facebook can become fans.

People can follow you on Twitter. I simply Tweet about each blog post I make, and the occasional comical situation I encounter.

LinkedIn is similar to Facebook in that it’s a social networking site. Within LinkedIn, a great place to build relationships is “Answers”. You can offer answers to those who have questions in your area of expertise. If you answer gets voted the best one, you get a point in that category.

Here is the issue: maintaining all these accounts can be time consuming and unprofitable. The reason for this is nearly always a lack of focus on your part. In order for a plant to grow it needs to be watered and to get the proper amount of nutrients; social media is much the same. You can’t focus on it for a week, forget about it for a month, and then focus on it for a week and expect to reap fruits from your labor.

Success in the social media arena, much like anything in life, takes constant, continuous, education and communication (CCEC).

It’s easy to get overwhelmed trying to keep up with social media trends, so my advice to you is don’t. Focus on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Turn these sites into profit centers and you will have a formula you can apply to the other ones in a systematized manner.

Learn more about LinkedIn Answers>>

Learn more about Facebook Pages>>

Thank you for reading this post. I hope you found some insight that will help you simplify your online presence. True success, to me, is not about doing more, it’s about doing less and doing it better.

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