Social networking a.k.a. the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Ecademy, LinkedIn and so on have become the new marketing buzzwords. Everyone is interested in finding out about them and knowing how to use them to get business in through the door.
So, if you’re interested and want to use them in your business, where should you start? Here’s my top ten tips:
1) Don’t anticipate to see clients right away. Social networking is a long term strategy. It’s about relationship building. The more people see you adding information and content to online networking sites, the more people will get to know you and want to do business with you.
2) New social networking sites are emerging all the time, so don’t expect to keep up with all of them. Select 3-4 to keep on top of and work on these. That means setting up your account and regular posting on there so that people can get to know you.
3) Write a generic profile of your business and about you on Word and then use it on all of the social networking sites you’re going to try out. In this case, if you get invited to start using another one, your profile is already composed.
4) Link your social networking sites as much as possible. By that I mean, use sites like http://www.ping.fm to assist you in managing all of your sites. That way, you can write an article on one site i.e. Twitter and have the content automatically copied to all of the other social networking sites you’re using.
5) Write as much content as you can. Put your articles on there, give your opinion or views on topics and write down tips. You can write absolutely anything on social networking sites, so get creative.
6) Write as often as you can. It’s no good setting all up and then ignoring it. For social networking to work for you people have to get to know you and that means you need to write as often as you can i.e. at least once a day.
7) Use instruments like http://www.tweetlater.com to set up posts in advance. That way, even if you can’t physically post something, packages like this will do it for you.
Remember to learn about other people. It’s not just all about you. Get in touch with some of the people that request you add them as friends and find out about them. The more you build that relationship, the more likely it is that people will want to do business with you.
9) Very often on social networking sites, groups of like-minded individuals and businesses have been set up. That means it’s easy to locate all the people interested in what you do. Join these groups and start supporting them. You never know what could happen.
10) Finally, please be careful out there. Remember that anyone can write anything on the web, so although you may be genuine, the person you’re communicating with may not be. If you’d like increasing your streams of income, take extra caution when doing business on the internet.
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