Some social media techniques take too much of your time. So I asked Chris Winfield to teach us some easier techniques for using social media. Chris is the Co-Founder and President of 10e20, a search and social media marketing firm.

Here are some of the techniques he recommended:

Message boards – With Facebook/Twitter/etc getting most of the attention, it’s easy to forget how powerful message boards can be. Go to rankings.big-boards.com, which has a list of messages boards ranked by size. Pick the ones that fit your specialty and start joining the conversation.

“Real” contacts – When you come back from a conference, meetup or Mixergy event, add the people you meet to your online networks (LinkedIn, etc). In general, connections to people whom you met in person are stronger than contacts you’ve never met before.

Be a resource – Be clear about your specialty and then look for people who need help in that area. In his Mixergy interview James Siminoff said that’s a big part of how he built up his company, PhoneTag. He set up alerts to let him know when people complained about voicemail so he could contact them about his voicemail-to-text service.

Get friendly reviews – Ask your friends to review your business or product on the appropriate services. If you have a restaurant, link your friends to your profile on YellowBot or Citysearch. If you wrote a book, have your friends review it on Amazon.

[Tony Adam introduced me to Chris. Thanks! Photo credit on "add contacts" slide: Andronicusmax.]

Do you have any other social media techniques? Tell me by email or in the comments.

“Right click” to download the full interview!