In the beginning there was Word, decades before social media madness. Once upon a time being a master of MS Word and Excel Spreadsheets (which still confounds me) was enough of a skill-set to provide you with value in business. Now it’s not enough to be proficient in every app of MS Office but be able to manage and operate content management systems (CMS) as well as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) like a boss.
If you’re an entrepreneur the road to success is laid out in the book, which is a user manual called “Predictable Revenue” by Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler. The online marketing best advice you can get. 
Not mentioned very much in the book “Predictable Revenue” is how important important Social Media systems are to working with your online marketing strategy. It takes years with a new brand, to build-up enough followers and develop enough influence to make any meaningful marketing metrics. However, you virtually don’t exist without Twitter and Facebook, plus people check-out LinkedIn for due-diligence and others want to see your Instagram feed to get an idea of your lifestyle.
Some people like Hootsuite or other Social Media Management systems, while others prefer to mainly focus on Twitter and have it be the primary platform for sharing news, ideas and updates. Twitter has a certain learning-curve to understand a good ratio of followers to how many people you follow and your media marketing. Plus it’s very important to be consistent with messaging on Twitter but be aware of how that’s going to look on your Facebook and LinkedIn pages, so it’s a good idea to have dedicated content for your company or project on both Facebook and LinkedIn.
Instagram also posts to Facebook, then if you manage WordPress blogs, as any good marketing maven would be, these are most likely set to post on Twitter and Facebook, which starts to be redundant. It’s recommended to fix your settings to make sure that Twitter posts a format with text only (unless you post an image to Twitter) because WordPress does such a nice job (automatically) of formatting and posting an article with the main image for that story. These functions and instructions can be found inside the Jet Pack bundle provided free as a Plugin on WordPress.
My word to the wise on how to avoid Social Media Madness, is to have a plan and use a pencil and paper to design the connecting of all social media accounts to and from your CMS or Blog, then make sure your Twitter is blasting correctly by looking from someone else’s perspective, ask for opinions from friends, if you’re posting too much to Facebook or LinkedIn, as there’s a risk of driving people away or just become annoying to your friends, so use some discretion.
Lastly, never ever succumb to the temptation to buy followers or follow for follow-backs. It takes time to develop a solid network in the real world, so imagine it’s just as hard and just as important to make decent, intelligent friends and have real followers in Cyber Space.
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