PING.FM

What if you also have profiles on Stumbleupon, Digg, and other social networking sites? You can use Ping.fm to put postings on all of them from a central source. This is a very effective tool for someone who has many different profiles all over the Web and wants to update them all from a central location. It can make you appear much more active than you really are.

Facebook Strategies For Building Lists

As of now, we've been pretty general about different ways to build your list quickly. However, each social networking platform has its own idiosyncrasies that can be exploited to get you up and running faster. In this section, we'll go over a simple way to get going on Facebook and how to use the features available on it to build your list.

STATUS UPDATES

Your profile on Facebook has a place called the Wall. There, you will have a box with the question ”What's on your mind?” printed inside it. This is the status update part of Facebook, and it allows you to post links and comments so that your friends can see what's going on in your life and business. The neat thing about the status update is that people can comment, rate it as “like,” and share it with their friends too. When another person does any of these actions on your status update, their circle of friends who aren't on your friends list also see your status update. That means, when you send out a status update, it has the potential to reach many more people than just the people who are in your circle of friends. That's why you should post status updates throughout the day and should stay active so people see more of you online. When they see something they like, many people will try to befriend you based on what you've said to one of your friends who is a mutual friend. Every time someone comments on your status update, reply with your own comment. This way, it will keep it up and active on more people's news feeds than if you didn't reply to them.

JOIN AS MANY GROUPS AS YOU CAN

Try to find groups within your market niche and join as many as you can. Then, you want to befriend the people in the groups too. Contribute to the conversation, but find out who these people are who are in your group and get to know them better. When someone joins you on Facebook, post a brief message on his/her wall or send a link to a welcome video. If he/she likes it, he/she might share it with his/her friends too, and you'll have an automatic wider audience.

CREATE YOUR OWN GROUP

If you choose to create your own group on a topic about your niche, you will be able to attract people from all over Facebook, not just from your immediate circle of friends. That's because Facebook will list it as its own entity, and people will join based on the topic and not on your personal profile.

Twitter Strategies For Building Lists

Twitter is a bit easier for list building because it is more transparent, and there are many third-party sites devoted just to helping you build your Twitter following. The very easiest strategy is just to start following people within your market niche. However, there's even a better way to identify the people who have a large influence on Twitter; by following those people and they finding you interesting enough to follow back, you'll get a lot of good press this way.

TWINFLUENCE.COM

This site shows you the movers and shakers on Twitter. What's nice is that you get to see the people you want to follow right away, not because they're in your niche, but maybe because they have a wide reach. The problem with following them is that many are so popular that they won't bother following you back. That's okay if you don't add too many, but if you do, try to get them to notice you; that way, you'll get instant hype for your tweets.

HOW TO GET RETWEETED

Once you're following them, you can try to get noticed by simply retweeting something they've said that appeals to you. A retweet is a device that copies a tweet of someone’s and adds it to the other person's status update as a new tweet in his/her stream. If enough people do that, it has the potential to spread across the network like a virus, thus the naming of a “viral tweet.” If that happens, the person can reach millions in very little time and get massive exposure for himself/herself and his/her business. The way to start all this is to either tweet something interesting or to retweet something someone else said that was interesting. Often, as a matter of courtesy, people will thank other people for retweeting their tweets, and it will include the person's Twitter username in the stream.

FOLLOW FRIDAYS

Another way to build a bigger list on Twitter is to participate on Follow Fridays. That's where you post recommendations of Tweeple on your status update so that others will follow them. Many people will thank you for the recommendation and will add you to their list of Follow Friday recommendations too. It's easy to do. Just add the hash tag #FollowFriday at the end of a list of recommended Twitter usernames, and everyone will know that you are asking them to follow these people too.