Now that you are all setup for your social media, it is time to become part of the discussion.  Contribute by posting and writing your own content. 

A posting schedule is a great way to get a few extra posts in throughout the year in a way that keeps things relevant.  Consider wishing happy birthdays, saying thank you on Veterans Day and generally looking forward to upcoming anniversaries of historical events that might be discussion worthy.  I like using “Did you know…” statements or posting interesting and obscure facts for this type of post.   A schedule can also be used as part of a bigger media plan for invitations to an event or an upcoming product launch.  To get started with a posting schedule, browse to hootsuite.com and start posting content to the scheduler. 

Blogging is hot these days, and there are a lot of people out there sharing their opinions online in self-published, often-not-edited blogs.  The importance of a blog is simple, it is a keyword rich content source that will help direct people to your site and help your search engine placement.

Hootsuite is my preferred social media aggregation tool. This website enables me to see the feeds from all of my social media covered thus far on one screen.  I can also post to all social media networks with a bit more confidence then Ping.fm.

Ping.fm is a simple and free service that makes updating your social networks easy.  Ping.fm is designed to enable you to push out a message to multiple social networks very easily.  Ping.fm is one of two social media publishers we will discuss, and is especially interesting (and potentially dangerous) because you can update all your social media networks from ping.fm by sending a SMS text message to a private number or to a special email address.

Bit.ly is a link shortening service.  Swing your browser over to http://bit.ly  and take any long web address and you can shrink that big ugly URL down to a simpler 15 characters.

We saved signing up for Google+ to this step in the social media roadmap even though you have already signed up for a number of Google services because Google+ is a new social media service, it is still in beta, and while I believe it will be huge in the near future, it ranks lower on my list of importance than the other services we have just covered.

LinkedIn is like a business networking rolodex.  The site is about networking with people you know to find other people who you might want to know.  Leveraging connections is the goal, sharing information about yourself and your interests help build out your profile and make you more easily found by others.

A lot of people just don’t get Twitter.  I am often asked “who has the time to read what everyone else has to say.”   I will admit that even I thought Twitter was very overwhelming at first.  Twitter is actually quite simple in concept: you may have something to say and things you have to learn about.  Search for terms, and you can read what other people are saying.