Use pragmatic advice from the article “Yes, You Need to Tweet” from Entrepreneur.com to leverage social media for success in your business – and remain sane while doing it. Maintaining a presence on all social media and online platforms can be a daunting task for a small business, but tips from the authors of the book “Million Dollar Web Presence” will help simplify the mission.

Using multiple platforms amplifies your voice and increases the number of potential customers and contacts that you can reach. To minimize the time and effort this takes, you can interface your blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. This way, blog entries will automatically create a tweet, which will be posted on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Here is the “Social media action plan in 12 minutes or less per day,” courtesy of authors Chad Barr and Alan Weiss.

• Create a new blog and aim to post at least three times per week
• Create Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles and possibly a Facebook business page, and design attractive Twitter and Facebook screens
• Create a Bit.ly account to shorten your URL tweets
• Start following others and accept requests to follow you
• Integrate social media platforms with each other and with your blog
• Tweet five times per week or more
• Ask or answer three LinkedIn questions per week and repurpose your answers on your blog
• Comment on other powerful bloggers’ posts a few times per week
• Engage in discussions whenever you can.

Click here to read the entire article from Entrepreneur.com.