Creating a Social Networking Plan: Creating & Communicating Tools

Choosing Your Tools:

Carrying on from my article about dividing your social networking efforts into three catagories (Listening, Creating or Communicating) today we’ll look at tools to help you Create and Communicate.  (If you missed ‘Listening’ you can read it here)

Creating (and sharing)Tools:

Inspiration archive sites: I like to keep an ideas factory – a database of all the ideas that come to me. I make note of interesting things I’ve heard or read that I want to discuss in a blog, or photos I’ve taken or found online, anything at all that inspires me.  When I need to create “remarkable” content, I have a large resource of options to get me started.  Some people like to keep this collection as a physical journal; others prefer to keep a digital file.  I am an avid fan of ‘Evernote’.  It helped me collate my ideas and write this book.  It’s a free online service where you can dump and organize all your ideas, save web snippets, use you mobile device or webcam to store images and dictate audio. Its uses’ are endless.  For more info visit: www.evernote.com.

Blog editors: WordPress, Blogger, Twitter and Tumblr (micro-blogging) etc.

Video Sharing sites: Use the inbuilt camera on your computer, your phone or a stand-alone video camera and distribute via video platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo or Blip.tv.

Photo Sharing sites: Use your smart phone or digital camera to take snaps and share via sites like Flikr and photobucket, as well as your blog and social networking pages or photo sharing.

Live Broadcast Sites: Don’t forget live video sites if you want to broadcast a webinar, check out Ustream and Blog TV.

Communicating Tools:

Social Networking sites are hives of online communication, they include sites such as Friendster, Facebook, Myspace, Reverbnation (for musicians) and LinkedIn.  Ning.com is site that allows you to create niche social networking sites of your own (or join others already set-up).  The ‘experts’ predict social networking usage to shift from general sites (like Facebook) towards smaller, topic-specific sites within the next two years.

Blog communities: You can also engage in conversations and communicate via blog sites such as Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr.

Book marking sites: such as Reddit, Stumbleupon and Digg give you an opportunity to reach out to people, and share your thoughts, observations and opinions with others too.

Content management sites: like YouTube and Flikr have strong online communities which are great opportunities for communication.

Please add your favorite Social Networking tools via the comments below – this is far from a complete list, but instead more a tasting menu!

In my next article I cover how to eat an elephant – breaking down your daily social networking efforts into small manageable (if not grey and chewy) bites!

Until then – Keep sharing!

“In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.”

Kahlil Gibran quotes (Lebanese born American philosophical Essayist, Novelist and Poet. 1883-1931)

Image by Ben Heine via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

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