Social Networking has become a hot topic lately. No matter where you look, there are blog posts and news articles touting social networking and listing the many and varied benefits of a well done campaign. Few of these articles go beyond the glow and fill you in on the logistics of actually creating a social networking campaign or fill you on in how you should approach social networking and measure its success. There are almost as many theories concerning social media as there are companies that sell the service. We can’t tell you how they do it, but we can tell you how we do.

Here at Eyeflow, our approach is to build a network around a client’s business using existing social networks. The reason we take this approach instead of creating a social network from scratch is because it’s better (read easier, quicker less expensive) to invest our time in attracting people from hubs they already frequent like Myspace, Facebook and Twitter than to try to build someone their own version. Not only is this technique better — it has a much higher ROI and quicker results.

Short video explaining how social networks work.

Building a Network Around your Blog
By creating a presence for businesses within popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, we place them where their customers, clients, partners, and associates already are. Then, by linking those profiles to the business’s blog and linking the blog back to the profiles a central communication point for your social networking efforts is created. This naturally draws those in the online community to the blog and also creates a stronger online presence for the business which is useful, not only from a traffic point of view, but also from a branding point of view.

So, we’ve set up profiles on all the top social networks and even niche social networks related to a business’s brand. Now the question is how does one monitor all the different profiles and pages? After all, what good is a social network if communication gets lost and is never seen by our clients?

We thoughtfully created a complete system for monitoring all of the social networks from one control panel which includes access to social media profiles, alerts and notifications of messages, reputation management tools, content syndication and more. This system makes it easy monitor the vast social network campaign and it can be easily customized and manipulated.

Syndicating Your Media
If you listen to SEO gurus, you’ll soon tire of the phrase “Content is King.” There is, however a really good reason why that adage is repeated so frequently. Just like traditional SEO, a Social Media Campaign needs content to survive. Who’s going to care if there’s nothing to find out– if there’s no news, no one will read or follow or anything. Traditionally, if you made a blog post and you wanted to get the word out you’d have to login to your Facebook accoutn and make an update then login to Twitter and post a tweet then bookmark it on your favorite social bookmarking site. Then, maybe, people would notice and read your words of wisdom or. This notification process could take up a lot of time.

We came up with a rather elegant solution, if we do say so ourselves. Through the use of RSS feeds, special plugins and tools, blog posts are automatically syndicated across the web of social networks we set up and go on to include search engines, RSS directories, blog portals as well as all of the social media profiles. This saves time and gets the word out quickly.

Summary of our Automated Social Network Campaign Plan
Work smarter, not harder. When planning social networking efforts, it’s important that you use the tools available to make it as painless and quick as possible, otherwise you may find yourself spending a lot of time that could be used more wisely. Things like automatic content syndication, an activity hub and a good blog will make all the difference in terms of return on investment. This includes both monetary and time investment, since in today’s world, the two are almost interchangeable. And remember, content is king.

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