Social media can be a time suck. There’s no getting around it.

It takes time to read even a small percentage of the excellent information available today. It takes time to share the stuff you’ve read and thought about and find valuable.

And most of us are also trying to run businesses and do work for our clients.

Enter social media automation. You know, tools. Many of us use some form of automation, like Hootsuite or Buffer or Triberr, to post the information we want to share with our networks. Some of us more effectively than others, perhaps.

Not long ago I was called out on a friend’s blog for having tweeted the exact same message and blog post at the exact same time as three other people. He included a screen shot to illustrate. Then asked what someone would think of seeing four consecutive tweets highlighting the same thing. He wondered whether that would be perceived as spammy behavior and whether the personal recommendations (of the post tweeted) would be diminished by being revealed as automated and impersonal.

Fair questions. I responded that I unapologetically use automated tools for some of the sharing I do in social media. Others commented that, while they were uneasy with the idea of automation, they understood the value and use tools at times. One person commented that someone sharing a link on Twitter without crafting a personal message makes him feel like they don’t care about the content they’re sharing or their own credibility.

Really?

I can’t imagine any of the clients I work with having the time to stay abreast of their social network updates without using some degree of automation. Clearly it makes sense to be as personally involved with your networks as possible. We are being social after all. Many of the people who balance the use of automated tools and personal connections do so by staying involved and responding personally, dipping in and out of their networks to comment or answer questions. Not just broadcasting endless messages and links automatically.

And that’s just it. Balance. Between personal involvement and automation.

Last week Danny Brown addressed the same topic – in slightly more energetic terms. His point is that social media “…works for people the way they need it to work, not how someone else uses it.” And that resonates for me.

If you’ve made it this far down the page you might be wondering what these automated tools are. The number and range of tools for updating your social networks is enormous and growing every day. I found a post on the Kissmetrics blog listing several really good tools for sharing content including Buffer (one of my favorites), Hootsuite (also excellent) dlvr.it and Sprout Social. These are just a few of the many tools available to help you manage your social network updates. I also use Twitterfeed and Triberr and am now testing Jugnoo.

Yesterday I posted about the importance of taking the time to personalize the invitations you send out on Linkedin. Most of the people who send out invitations on Linkedin use the boilerplate language supplied by Linkedin and that irks me.

Am I being hypocritical here? Perhaps, although that is not my intent.

Using automation to share a blog post on Twitter, from a blogger whose work I admire and who is consistently cranking out quality posts (even while I don’t agree with every word) feels different than issuing an invitation to connect without any personal message. But that’s me. You might handle it differently.

Are you wondering where social media fits in? How to balance your work load and your social networking? We can help. Give us a call at 419.740.1262. We’ll show you where to start and how to stay on top of it all.

Practical advice but not always easy to remember as we fly through updates and videos posted by friends we trust. In this case, Ochman’s friend’s account had been hacked first and neither was aware of it.

ZDNet states that hackers have used a Ramnit worm variant to harvest 45,000 Facebook login credentials worldwide, purportedly mostly from users in the United Kingdom and France. According to a statement from the social network, more than half of the information stolen was from inactive accounts. However, as blogger Emil Protalinski points out, that still leaves about 20,000 people who, like Ochman, have had their accounts hacked. The possibility exists that infected Facebook account holders will find that the email accounts they have used to access Facebook have been infected as well.

So what do you do if, or more likely, when your account is hacked? First of all, do what I did right after reading my friend’s post. Change your  password. Don’t use the same email you use for other accounts and make your password strong. Then change the password to the email account you use to access your Facebook account. And that’s just for starters. You may need to uninstall and reinstall your web browser. Monitor your account closely and close your account each time you leave the site. (Leaving your account open apparently leaves you more open to hackers.) Facebook encourages users to visit and “like” the Facebook Security page to receive updates about how to protect your information both on and off the social network. Yet the most recent post on the Facebook Security wall is from December 2011, with no mention of the Trojan Ramnit.

Finally, check your security settings again and check the applications you have allowed access to your account. Some of us have so many applications installed that checking all of them feels overwhelming.  Knowing which applications have permission to access your social network account is critical. An easy way to address this is to use the tool mypermissions to quickly and easily check and edit the permissions you have given to applications across the web.

Facebook has, for better or worse, become part of our daily lives. According to a survey by comScore, released in December of 2011, one in every seven online minutes is spent on Facebook. Facebook’s active user base has grown to more 800 million and according to Facebook the typical user has 130 friends and is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events. Take a second close look at your passwords, permissions and security settings. Share this story with your networks and remind them to do the same.

According to Zone Alarm, more than 20% of Facebook newsfeed links currently open viruses and 7 Facebook logins are compromised every second each day. The odds are pretty good that you may have to deal with this–or will know someone who does.

Earlier this week, in a discussion with a local businessman about the power and benefits of social networking, I did a search in Google for my name. My site and blog came up as did my profiles in LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Posterous. No sign of my Facebook fan page. My fan page is relatively new and I use it to share information about using social media for business. I share links to the posts others have written, I ask questions often and occasionally get responses from my 324 fans. I share the rare posts from my own blog. I started my fan page deliberately so that I would have personal experience with the positives and negatives of maintaining a Facebook page for my social media consulting business.

So I searched on a former client’s name. No Facebook fan page. Yet he has a carefully tended page with thousands of fans and his page used to come early in results from a search on his name. I then searched for Coca Cola; a well known brand with an extremely popular page. No fan page. I started to ask questions, first surreptitiously and then openly. I have tweeted, emailed and posted and no one seems to have an answer. Yet. Some of my friends offer the opinion that Google has, once again, changed its algorithms and that explains it. Or have posited that the inclusion of real-time search has changed how pages come up in search now. An SEO expert explained that I needed to write my posts differently using my page name within the post so that Google would read it and include it.

That may be the answer. We’ll see. Feels a bit awkward to include that language but it’s worth trying. However, that doesn’t explain why it used to come up and now doesn’t. My fan page, Allen Mireles Social Media Consulting or http://facebook.com/amsocialmediaconsulting, shows up in a search from within Facebook. As does my former client’s and Coca Cola’s. From outside of Facebook, however, not so much. My fan page shows up on page two of a Yahoo! search on my name (it didn’t yesterday) so that’s something. But what changed? And how much does it matter?

Oh wait! A Bing search on my name yields three references to my Facebook fan page on page one of the results. Has my fan page become a victim of dueling search engines?

What do you think? Do you have any suggestions? What am I missing here?

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