If you’re like me, you’re addicted to Facebook. So many of us are. In fact, according to facebook.com there are currently more than 750 million active users on the popular networking site. That means that millions of us worldwide are busy tagging, friending and uploading each and every day. Facebook is like your morning coffee—it’s impossible to start the day without it. Maybe your productivity is slightly down but it’s totally worth it to check our favorite wall posts!

So how addicted are you? Here are some signs that you may be addicted to Facebook:

1. You think about Facebook even when you’re offline. Have you ever been at a party and had the urge to bust out your smart phone to update your status? There are many individuals (including me) who have trouble even falling to sleep at night because we’re thinking about playing Farmville or what our friends are up to. Besides, who knows what photos will be tagged of you by morning.

2. You’re late. Okay, so you may get a little distracted by your friend’s favorite YouTube video of the day. This is for sure the behavior of an addict.

3. Your family and friends make fun of you. If those closest to you (or even worse—your coworkers) notice your Facebook habits, you may have a slight issue.

4. You check your smart phone during dinner. Out with friends? You have to let the world know where you are. You always make sure to check in with Facebook Places.

5. You stalk. Oops—I mean check up on your friends. Do you have individuals you frequently check out? Then yes, you may have a problem.

There is some good news, though! Those who spend time on social networking sites are connected and more socially engaged. You have greater opportunity to spread some very fantastic messages to your friends and acquaintances. You’re “in the know” and that’s not a bad thing. However, if you find yourself in need of a Facebook break, here are some quick fixes!

1. Try forcing yourself to do something else. Spend time working out, practicing yoga or watching a movie. Better yet! Invite friends to go to a concert, café or happy hour. After all, you’ll have something to post about afterward.

2. Set certain times of the day to Facebook. This is especially true if you have restrictions because of work. Make sure that if you are online checking status updates, that your company is cool with it.

3. If you must Facebook, do it for a cause. There are many causes out there that need awareness. Whether it’s breast cancer, mental illness, homelessness or animal abuse; do your research and make your friends aware of how they can help make the world a better place. Take advantage of your Facebook popularity and really help others. Facebook Causes is a great place to start.

4. Turn your obsession—or knowledge—into a paying gig. Many companies are looking for talented people who understand how social networking should be down. Many businesses may be willing to hire someone who is business savvy and entrepreneurial. As a proud Facebook addict, you may already have the skills necessary to be an online manager or freelancer.

If you are like me, your Facebook addiction may be very real. However, that’s not always such a bad thing. It may be time consuming, but there are a lot of great tools and online bookmarks out there to help. Do you find yourself always wanting to see what your friends are up to? Do you enjoy posting and sharing the latest YouTube videos or interesting websites?

Larger companies with massive revenues can easily make the decision to spend thousands of dollars on customer relationship management (CRM) applications. For many of these bigger businesses, they may legitimately require the power and capabilities these expensive programs provide. For the small to medium sized business, however, such extravagance may not be an option. If this is the case, what then can they choose to provide affordable CRM solutions?

The power of the Internet and its constant evolution has brought a wide variety of affordable service solutions to many smaller, less wealthy companies. Commonly referred to as cloud computing solutions, the concept of Software as a Service (SaaS), has created opportunities for the smaller players in an industry to get the power and benefit of those more expensive applications. While some control may be lost by not having ownership of the service, the cost benefits and maintenance challenges associated with ownership are surpass the losses.

This list will point one in the direction of five of the more popular, effective, and free social CRM applications available right now. Links are provided and will open a new browser window providing the reader with the ability to keep track of the following list while investigating the various CRM solution options.

5 No-Cost Customer Relationship Management Applications

• FreeCRM.com: Free CRM is a web based software solution for customer relationship management and sales force automation. Free CRM is great for contact and lead tracking, sales and contact management, sales pipeline management and forecasting, customer service and business management.
• Relenta: Relenta automatically gathers the pieces of data that are typically scattered across separate applications (such as email clients, group calendars, CRM solutions and to-do lists), and displays them on one single page, as a chronological stream of activity associated with each contact. This gives one at-a-glance knowledge of where things stand.
• Zoho CRM: Zoho CRM offers complete customer relationship life-cycle management software for managing Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, and Inventory activities in a single system. Simple to use and packed with features for automation, customization, integration, and collaboration to grow ones business and have a complete views of customer interactions.
• SalesPush: Created by sales professionals for sales professionals, SalesPush is a straightforward and immediate way to achieve improvements in sales performance. Real-time, end-to-end visibility into all sales data puts the control of the entire sales process in the CRM professional’s hands. SalesPush is an easy to use and affordable CRM solution.
• Time To Note: Time To Note is a strong, well designed system built using Google’s App Engine and APIs. Their free service is limited to two user accounts, however unlimited plans are very reasonable. Small businesses can easily get by on the free service and enjoy having a complete history of each customer on a single page. Tasks are easily added, edited and monitored on a single page as well. Adding new clients or companies is clean and easy, and happen all on a single page also. No more multi-page click and wait for page refreshing.

The power and elegance these free services provide might make one wonder how the companies are able to afford to give away their services for no charge. Cloud computing is usually the biggest factor allowing for no-cost service offerings. Plus, if the applications provide the small to medium sized businesses with superior CRM capabilities, chances are as the businesses expand they’ll require more user accounts and will happily pay the service provider to continue using those CRM applications.

Google, up until recently, has allowed you to create a profile for your Google account that could include a pretty nice amount of dofollow links. So if you are lucky enough to have created your Google profile several months ago, you may stand a chance at adding your website link with good anchor text for a dofollow backlink, as I have with my personal Google profile.

Although new profiles have nofollow links, I created one for oes tsetnoc anyway. I figure even if the links are nofollow, the profile still stands a chance of coming up in searches, so it can’t hurt.

What do you think about Google profiles? Well worth it, or a waste of time now that they are nofollow?

The next step after setting up the blog and a few posts was to start spreading it across the social bookmarking sites and networks.

Social Bookmarking

Many SEO tools, such as SEO for Firefox, SEO Quake, Website Grader and more value whether you have links incoming from networks such as Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon. So I bookmarked the main homepage on Delicious and StumbleUpon, and then the articles on all three.

These networks, although powerful, do not give you dofollow links, with exception to Digg, but only if you get a lot of Diggs and make the first page. So I also bookmarked the homepage on various dofollow bookmarking sites such as MyLinkVault, A1 Webmarks, Spurl and Spotback.

Social bookmarking will be an on-going process, as I will bookmark all of the new articles, and hopefully visitors will as well. Remember in link building, it’s not just getting links to the homepage – deep links to internal pages boost rankings too!

Twitter

I was a little surprised that @oestsetnoc was still available on Twitter, so that was the first thing I snagged. Twitter is a great way to find people who are interested in the same niche.

Once I setup a basic profile and sent out a few tweets, I started looking for other people doing the oes tsetnoc contest and followed them. Then I registered the account on Twellow, a Twitter directory of members that allows you to create a profile, complete with dofollow links back to your main website.

I also added this Twitter account to Tweetlater, which will automatically follow my new followers as well as send them a greeting message to learn more about this site.

Facebook

I couldn’t decide between a Facebook page or group, and so I created both, but I have decided ultimately that the group will be better, as there is more encouragement in groups for discussion. So I hope that all the contest participants will join in the oes tsetnoc Facebook group and share some tips, tricks, questions and advise.

Other Social Networks

There are several dofollow social networks that allow you to link to multiple websites on your profile page, some with anchor text, others without. Since I already have profiles on these sites (LinkedIn, Gather, Vox, etc.), I went ahead and added the main link to this site to those profiles.

Your Social Media Marketing Plan

What is your social media marketing plan? Do you do it for traffic, link building, or both?