Image by the official Location Independent photographer, Amy Palko.

** This is a guest post by Sharon Hurley Hall. Find out more about Sharon below. **

As a location independent professional, online social connections are a real lifeline. In many cases, these will be the main way that you connect with colleagues and clients. But there are dozens – possibly hundreds – of networks out there, so how do you decide what’s worth your while?

I always want to try new things, so I belong to dozens of networks but of late my interaction has been limited to just three. Here’s what I’ve chosen, why I’ve chosen them and what I get out of each…

Twitter

For me, Twitter is a great place to connect with others in my profession (freelance writers) as well as those in the various communities I belong to (such as location independent professionals. Many of the people at the top of their game participate regularly in conversations on Twitter.

While you may be skeptical about how much can be achieved in 140 characters, since I joined Twitter I have:

• Connected with people who had jobs to offer
• Got technical support on Wordpress issues (very important as my client-focused website runs on Wordpress)
• Participated in an online Q&A session with people interested in becoming location independent

And that’s just the beginning. One of the reasons I like Twitter is that communication has to be focused – people get to the point very quickly when space is limited. Given its popularity and usefulness, I think every location independent professional should have a Twitter account.

Facebook

Facebook is the other place where I spend my time. I have to confess that my Facebook account started primarily for personal reasons – to keep in touch with friends and family around the world. This is an important part of maintaining balance in your life.

However, there’s no reason that you can’t use it for both business and pleasure. With Facebook, not only can you write Twitter style updates, but you can post longer notes. It’s easy to integrate blog posts, presentations, photos and so on and you can keep business and personal separate by creating friends lists to determine who sees what.

If you want to keep it strictly business, you can create a Facebook page and add all the same information to it – it can become a hub for a community related to your business, though in my opinion, Ning is a better tool to use for that.

LinkedIn

As a business person, I don’t think you can afford not to be on LinkedIn. This site is focused on business networking and it’s quite effective. I’ve had a few nibbles from business prospects and the profile page looks quite attractive. The integration of more social tools, such as status updates, linking blog posts, presentations and more makes this an ideal platform for the location independent professional.

Are these the right networks for you? Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. They are popular and effective, but perhaps there’s another network where people in your profession tend to hang out. In that case, that’s where you should build a presence.

Smart Social Media Strategies & Tactics

4 Simple Rules For Building Your Social Media Presence:

1. Pick your networks (less is more)
2. Automate what you can
3. Update regularly
4. Focus on being useful and helpful to others; promotion should only be a small part of your activities on social media platforms

Automating Your Social Media Interactions:

One of the key things as a location independent professional is to keep your social media interactions from being the horse instead of the cart.

When it’s the horse, you will find that you have spent hours lost in the Twitter maze, without achieving any of the things that bring in income. That’s a big no-no. Instead, this has to be only a part of what you do. One way to make sure of that is to introduce some automation…

I use the following tools to put some of my social media interactions on autopilot:

• Ping.fm – allows you to post to about 40 social networks at once using a variety of methods. You can post on the site, use SMS or instant messaging or do what I do and use an API key to post to Ping.fm from another site. For me, that site is Twitterfeed…

• Twitterfeed – as the name suggests, Twitterfeed allows you to post RSS feed updates to Twitter at specified intervals, but it also allows you to post to Ping.fm. So I set my blog posts, Delicious bookmarks and Stumbles to post automatically to Ping.fm and via that to LinkedIn and Facebook as well the other social networks where I am not particularly active.

• Hootsuite – I use this to post the same feeds to Twitter, mainly because it has a click tracking function.

• Friendfeed – this is a profile where I can add links to sites that I contribute to and have those update my feed automatically.

The beauty of this system is that I can forget about it. I make sure to limit the number of daily posts from any single source and in between times I use my Twitter and Facebook accounts as normal, focusing on promoting other people’s stuff rather than my own. This makes for a good balance.

It also means that on days when I need to focus on work, I can spend ten minutes stumbling, bookmarking and sharing, secure in the knowledge that they will filter onto my social media sites at some time within the next day.

Sharon Hurley Hall is a location independent freelance writer and blogger. She provides straight talk about freelance writing at Get Paid To Write Online.

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