I often face social network fatigue. Social networking is time consuming, sometimes confusing and difficult to measure ROI, yet the marketing and brand building opportunities are endless. Our print company, like many other companies, are active in MANY social networks, but it becomes difficult to manage an organized effort to properly engage the audience. 2012 should be the year your company organizes an instrumental social marketing plan, and here’s how to get started.

1. Get help from 3rd party apps

Applications like Hootsuite can be helpful when posting to numerous social networks, especially ones of lower importance. Hootsuite connects with MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and more. We don’t use Hootsuite for those particular larger networks, but the application does provide some nice analytics tools to monitor how much people are discussing your company.

I use Hootsuite for Foursquare, MySpace, LinkedIn and Ping.fm. Ping.fm is another third party app allowing you to automatically post to many other places.

2. Write a schedule

Sit down and actually plan out days each social network should be engaged by your company and strictly follow it. Don’t try posting on EVERY social network every single day. For instance, we space out posts on Facebook and Google+ every two days. Some networks, like Twitter, we post everyday since its faster paced. Planning and splitting up days for some networks will save time.

We actually drafted a schedule on our whitewall (a wall painted with whiteboard paint) to start out with. It’s a little lame, but we’re moving on to a more sophisticated scheduling platform. This was just a way to get our feet wet.

3. Get staff members involved

Once I split up the work with staff members, everything got a lot simpler for me. As the owner, I sometimes forget to delegate responsibility. Everyone at our shop now has some sort of marketing responsibility. Our designers post on our blogs, our finishers appear in our videos and our office manager shares the duties of social networking. Its more of a team effort and the social scene is no longer a burden to just me.

4. Focus on a theme

Each week we focus on a theme. We’re just not spouting whatever comes to mind. For instance, we may be having a large poster sale one week, so we focus on that. We might send an email blast about the sale (that’s why people signed up for our newsletter in the first place), but with social networks we talk mostly about the quality or color richness, show off some nice-looking orders….anything BUT the sale itself. People don’t want to read “15% off posters” every single day, but they do follow you to stay updated about your company.

5. Give each network meaning

For each network you participate in, try and give it a unique user experience. Don’t regurgitate the same boring stuff on every network. Doing so will not encourage customers to follow you through multiple channels.

For instance, we use Twitter to announce our daily deals. We don’t announce them on any other platform, so people following us on Twitter have an advantage. Our company blog only contains essential posts, but our Tumblr blog hosts a wider scope of posts from us. Our Instagram account offers the most personal insight into our company over any other medium. These are just a few examples of ways we keep each network experience unique.

6. Try and Engage

Now that we’re organized and posting consistently, we’re planning ways to better engage. People are not “liking” or commenting much for us right now because we’re not giving them any reason to. We should be asking for input, engaging with questions, drafting surveys or hosting more contests. It isn’t enough to just post about yourself. In fact, that’s a selfish one-sided conversation that is pretty much the opposite of what social networks stand for. It might take some testing and practice, but we’ll get the hang of it and so will you!