Updating your social profiles across even just a few social networking sites can be a daunting task.  Remembering to send out a “tweet” and a status update on your Facebook & LinkedIn profile every time you write a new blog article can sometimes feel like a full time job.  I am going to show you a few ways to make this a little easier.

There are many free tools out there in internet land that can speed up and automate these efforts.  Let’s look at a few of them.

TweetDeck

visit TweetDeck

TweetDeck works seamlessly with Twitter, and provides you with advanced statistics, local trends, Facebook integration, easy messaging, url shortening and more. Plus you can easily manage multiple Twitter accounts using TweetDeck – for example – If you have a personal account and a separate Twitter account for your website.

TwitterFeed

visit TwitterFeed

Twitter and blogs are a powerful combination and the free online service, TwitterFeed will automatically feed your blog updates to Twitter, Laconica, Ping.fm, or HelloTxt. After signing up on TwitterFeed you need to connect TwitterFeed with your Twitter (or other) account, provide a feed name and enter in the URL to your RSS blog feed. TwitterFeed also lets you choose how often to Tweet an update and you can also select a service to shorten the URL (e.g., bit.ly, TinyURL and others), and other customable options. If you maintain multiple blogs, you can add additional blog RSS feeds under one TwitterFeed account.

Ping.FM

visit Ping.fm

Ping.fm is a free online service that you can use to post a single message across more than 40 social networking sites, plus it is easy to use. First you need to create an account by providing your e-mail address and a password. Once logged in, from your dashboard you can edit your profile and select which social services you want to send your Ping.fm updates to. When you select a network from the provided list you simply log in to that account through Ping.fm (e.g., to add Twitter you log in using your Twitter credentials). Ping.fm is compatible with all the popular and many of the lesser-known social networking, photo-sharing, and social bookmarking sites. It also supports a number of blogging and instant messaging platforms. As you update via Ping.fm you can choose which of the social sites and services to send your message to prevent sending your message out to profiles and pages where the update may be seen as irrelevant spam.

HootSuite

visit HootSuite

HootSuite is the ultimate Twitter toolbox. With HootSuite, you can manage multiple Twitter profiles, add multiple editors, pre-schedule tweets, and measure your success.HootSuite lets you manage your entire Twitter experience from one easy-to-use interface.Creating an account is easy. Enter your Twitter username and password, and add a profile for each Twitter account you wish to manage. Got more than one tweeter per profile? Add multiple editors.

Then get going! Post live or pre-schedule tweets. Check stats and analytics right from the dashboard. Search Twitter for keyword information. Reply @ and Direct Message the folks in your conversation. Do all this and more from one fantastic interface.

Flock

visit Flock

Flock is a Mozilla-powered “social Web browser” that can be used to publish updates across your multiple social media profiles and accounts. The Flock browser supports a number of social media sites including Bebo, Digg, Gmail, Facebook, YouTube, and others. Using Flock you can access features of specific social sites (like Twitter updates and Facebook chat) and Flock lets you organize and manage multiple social accounts from a single control panel window. You can also use the built-in Blog editor to post to your blog, manage RSS feeds, upload photos to Flickr and send status or news updates to Twitter and other social sites that use news and status feeds, all from from the Flock browser interface.

Remember!  Social media is about being social.  Think about your strategy before you jump in.