This article is an excerpt from Get Connected: The Social Networking Toolkit for Business by Starr Hall and Chadd Rosenberg, available from Entrepreneur Press.

As if you didn’t have enough marketing tasks on your plate, and now you are adding social networking! How are you going to find the time to fit all these new and exciting sites and techniques into your schedule? Here are some tips, tricks and suggestions to help you save time on your social networking sites.

Social Networking Clients
Most social sites have what are called social networking clients. These are additional sites or free downloadable software to enhance or simplify your networking experience on the particular site that the client supports. For example, Tweetdeck is free downloadable software that helps simplify your Twitter experience. It manages all the messages that come directly to you or that involve your Twitter name in the conversation. This way you can respond only to Twitter conversations in which you’re being mentioned or directly messaged. This is only one of the many tools that Tweetdeck offers to support you.

Facebook has clients and partners such as Networkedblog, which allows you to connect your blog to your Facebook. Linkedin has dozens of partners and clients such as SlideShare where you can upload your PowerPoint presentations or slide shows and share them on your Linkedin page. Squidoo offers dozens of partnering clients as well and allows you to connect your Squidoo to YouTube, Linkedin, Facebook, and many more.