Online, you can take a single article, and break it into several blog posts. You can then break these posts into several tips to tweet out or share on Facebook. Why not record a video or podcast of the same information, and upload to YouTube and iTunes?

Another great ideas for repurposing – take online content and share it offline, or vice versa. If you’re doing a printed newsletter, that’s a great source of material for your blog. If it’s your content, never feel like it cannot go both ways. It might need a bit of tweaking, but good, helpful content is good, helpful content.

Finally, think about ways that this content can be used for other purposes. A great example of this comes from a post from Rich Rogala, a real estate marketing coach, entitled Any Holiday Happenings in your area? He share a good system that any business owner with a local audience could use.

In it, he recommends that real estate agents create a calendar of local holiday events, which they can email, mail and add to their website. This generates a month-long series of blog post ideas, as they can write posts with details on particular events (great search engine material). Finally, on the calendar, he lets offline readers know that they can find this detailed information on his blog (generates new readers and more eyes on your website).

There are so many different ways you can reuse your content, sometimes it just takes thinking about it differently. Every time you create content of any sort (written, audio or video), think about other ways you might be able to use it. Make it a contest! I’m sure no matter how many ways you think of, you’ll always be the winner!

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Need support with your blog, social media or more ideas like this for your business? Marketing Geeks Inc. is a full-service online marketing support company, providing you with web-savvy coaching to build your business, and web-savvy implementation support by our multi-VA team.

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What do you think? Do you follow brand-new Twitterers if they don’t have any updates at all? I’d love to hear feedback from other active Twitter-folk.

And of course, connect with me on Twitter!

But it doesn’t have to be. You just need a plan.

Here are what I consider the Top 10 Habits of those that use social marketing efficiently and effectively:

1. Participate. Obviously. But really, update your status. Add some photos so friends feel like they get to know you a little better. Mix personal with professional, comment, share, etc.
2. Find and USE tools that save you time. Ping.fm and HelloTxt.com are both tools that let you broadcast your status updates to most of the different social networking sites you may be a part of. And even sites that used to be strictly Twitter clients, like TweetDeck and Hootsuite, now give you the ability to update multiple sites. Forget logging into Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, and Plurk, etc. every time you want to update your status.
3. Have a set time limit for your social marketing efforts. It’s much too easy to look up and realize you’ve spent two hours catching up and chatting with friends, and haven’t gotten anything else done (guilty!).
4. Connect with people across several sites. This lets you establish a presence on the web. Heck, they’ll see you everywhere! And when they do, you’ll stand out in their minds just that little bit more. They’ll automatically feel they know you better. And they just might come to think of you as the expert, when they see you interacting and sharing valuable information with others.
5. Find an experienced social media/internet marketing virtual assistant. Now, this may sound like shameless self-promotion, but hear me out…It’s much easier for us to go in and take care of a lot of the little tasks that take up time, without getting distracted. We know how to make the most of your social marketing efforts, and can make suggestions for improvements. So think about it, okay?
6. If you’re into submitting news stories to boost your social news site profile, find a news story that is popular on one site and consider submitting it to another site that it would do well on. This works well on niche sites, that do not have quite the same level of activity as the larger, general news sites.
7. Find the sites that are working best for you, and concentrate on those. Just because I’m encouraging you to be social doesn’t mean you need to be active daily on every single site that exists. Focus on the most important ones, and drop by the others as you get time.
8. Take advantage of tools like RSS Readers. My preference is Netvibes. Instead of browsing from one blog, to another, to another, you can focus on headlines, and finding the stories that are important to you. You can then click through to comment, submit, stumble, etc. Use tabs in your RSS reader to separate out different subjects. Then you can focus on one subject at a time, and not get distracted.
9. Do unto others what you would have them do unto you. Want more people to comment on your blog posts? Go out and actively comment on others (see #8 above to avoid distraction!). Want more Stumbles, Diggs, social bookmarking submissions? Regularly submit quality content of others to these sites.
10. Last, but certainly not least, know why you’re there. Maybe this should even be #1? What is your intention for the site? Are you looking for more newsletter signups? Do you want more exposure for your teleseminars? More clients? Make sure you know why you’re doing it before spending any time. Then set your profiles up to focus on that. Have your updates geared towards that. The more diluted your message, the fewer results you will see.

There you have it. What I think are the Top 10 Habits of Super Effective Social Marketers!

This is where a virtual assistant that specializes in Facebook management comes in. This VA knows the ins and outs of Facebook, and can help with tasks such as:

• setting up a professional and effective profile
• recommending popular applications to use and those that should be avoided on business-focused profiles
• importing blog feeds to extend your blogs’ reach
• coming up with a strategy of where to look for “friends” that would be good to connect with
• creating and promoting events
• designing and marketing your Facebook page
• moderating your Facebook group
• helping you ensure your Facebook marketing stays fresh, instead of letting it fall by the wayside when you get too busy

Facebook is a great social marketing tool, but only if you keep up with it! A VA is an easy and affordable way to utilize this and many other social marketing tools. We’ve got a great team standing by, ready to help.

[tags]Facebook virtual assistant, social marketing virtual assistant, Rebecca Zwar[/tags]

Here is a great post by Chris Brogan on how to sell social media to your boss if you or they need to have concrete ways this can help the business.  Check it out if you need help articulating all the many benefits of social media, social networking and blogging.