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.

Word-of-mouth is the most effective form of advertising--but it's not the safest. Some people approach referral marketing with an attitude that all they have to do is get to know people and referral business will simply bubble up like spring water. What they don't realize is that once trust evaporates, so does the water.

In word-of-mouth (or referral) marketing, your integrity and your reputation are on the line all the time. You can't hide behind an ad. In the referral process, you're continually transparent; you've got to do what you say you're going to do. You've got to be professional. Any flaw in your integrity becomes instantly visible to everyone you're dealing with.

Buying a diamond is typically an interactive, hands-on experience. So $15 million Whiteflash.com, an online diamond jewelry retailer, has sought out ways to make its website seem more neighborly to upscale customers hailing from Singapore to Russia.

Whiteflash.com has achieved this by using live online chat to extend support beyond traditional U.S. retail hours and by getting chummy with bloggers who can keep its name well-represented in search engines.

In the process, the Houston-based company has grown organic visitor traffic to its site generated by the top three search engines by 411 percent since 2006, to an average of 10,000 visitors per month. Revenue, meanwhile, has grown by 15 percent, says CEO Debra Wexler, 49, who co-founded the business with Brian Gavin, 50, a fifth-generation diamond cutter.