Social Media Search Industry Redux

It was time to take the plunge.

I've been telling you for a while about my frustrations using social networks for business. The key is content management, and this week, I took the plunge.

Last week we began our press release initiative. Each month we'll tell you about one of our placements that month. In addition to creating a special account to send this update to each client contact without risking that one of our active email addresses is placed on a SPAM list, we wanted to find better ways to stay in touch.

I started by exporting into excel all of the candidates we've submitted on any active job since we switched to our current CRM 18 months ago, and saving it as a .csv.

With that .csv in hand, I began sending out invites on LinkedIn, Facebook, and following on Twitter.

LinkedIn was easy. It's designed for this sort of business networking, but twitter and facebook proved more of a challenge.

I have opinions. Some pretty controversial. I don't mind sharing personal details with my real life friends on facebook, but I don't want my business contacts to see that information. So I began to use privacy settings to determine which posted content is available to whom.

Unfortunately, you are not able to add friends to lists when mass inviting, so I had to first wait for each accepted invitation to assign the proper privacy settings.

Next I prioritized facebook status and twitter. I used to import the facebook status to twitter, but I've begun twittering for business, and using facebook statuses for the personal. Now twitter imports to Facebook.

Finally, I imported the blog to Hawkes Peers facebook page. In order to make content more relevant, I may begin posting business links to the Hawkes Peers page in Facebook instead of Tumblr.

Finally, I'll be adding business contacts in Plaxo Pulse. Another way of making sure we don't lose touch as your contact information changes.

Whether you are business owner, or just promoting yourself, clearly defining the role of each medium, and the associated privacy settings will help make sure your social networking does not interfere with your business networking.

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ADDENDUM:
It seems that Facebook will not let you import two feeds, and the bookmarklets have trouble deciding if they should post to my personal page or Hawkes Peers's page.

As a work around, I'm importing the blog to Tumblr, and tumblr to facebook, using the tumblr bookmarklet for business links, and the Facebook bookmarklet for personal.