Social networking tools, such as Facebook,
Twitter, Windows Live, and Google Buzz, are great for keeping in touch with
friends and family and having fun. Once banned from the business world, they
are now being allowed or even embraced on many company networks. Some employees
use social networking as a quick break from work. Studies have shown that
taking short breaks can make workers more productive, and hopping over to your
Facebook page for five minutes to check friends’ activities can be a quick and
efficient way to “get away” mentally, even if you need to stay physically in place.
Other people are going further and using social
networks to build business relationships with colleagues and potential clients.
LinkedIn is specifically targeted to that audience. And some are taking it
further still and using social networking sites to actively promote themselves
and their businesses. This can be particularly effective for self-employed
people, such as consultants, writers, and trainers. Many more would like to
utilize these tools to increase their business presence but aren’t sure how to go
about it. In this article, we’ll look at ways — beyond the obvious — to enhance your reputation (and your company’s) through social
networking. After all, it’s long been recognized that word of mouth is one of the best forms of
advertising, and social networking is just an online extension of that.
1: Just showing up is not enough
There’s a saying that “Just showing up is half the
battle.” But it’s important to remember that it’s only half. Too many people get stuck at that
point. They show up; they set up accounts on a dozen or more social networks — but then they let
them languish and never post. People check those sites, see no new content, and
after a while give up. Having a “dead” page is worse than having no page at all.
The primary reason people let their social
networking sites die is lack of time. Be sure you have the time to devote
before you set up a business-oriented site, and have a posting plan (for
example, a reminder to yourself to post something every other day). Stick to
the plan! Many people get overwhelmed because they take on too many social
networks at once. If your time is limited, choose just a few (for example,
Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter).
2: Just because you build it, that doesn’t mean they’ll come
Even if you faithfully update your social
networking pages every day and blast out clever and useful tweets from morning ’til night, it doesn’t matter much
unless you have followers and friends to see those promotional masterpieces.
Before you can use your social networking sites to promote yourself and your
business, you need to promote those social networking sites themselves.
Privacy is a big issue when you’re sharing personal
information on social sites, but for business, the more open your site is, the
better. To get maximum exposure, configure your privacy settings to let
everyone see what you post, not just the people who are already your followers
or friends. But before you do that, be sure to read the next item in this list.
3: Separate your business and personal online
lives
If you’re serious about promoting your business self,
you need to set up a separate social networking “place” for
business-related posts. I have separate Twitter accounts for different purposes
and one Facebook account for friends and family with another one for my readers
and business colleagues. Another alternative is to use one social network (such
as Facebook) for socializing and another (such as LinkedIn) for all your
business networking.
The key here is that you want to present yourself
as a professional when promoting your business, and it’s hard to do that
if your old college buddies are posting things on your wall about all the hard
partying you did when you were in school.
4: Use aggregator apps to better manage your
social networks
One way to manage your social networking accounts
is to visit each site on a daily or other regularly scheduled basis. An easier
way is to use tools such as TweetDeck that let you see and manage multiple SN
accounts all at once, without going to the Web sites and logging in each time.
5: Don’t flood the market
Posting regularly is important, but it’s just as important
not to over-post. If you use an aggregator app that makes posting easy, you
might be especially tempted to fire it up in the morning and send out five or
10 posts all at once on all your networks. It’s much better to space them out
throughout the day, so that your followers and friends don’t get overwhelmed
or lose interest in what you have to say after seeing several posts in a row
from you. Facebook, for example, will hide some of the posts in your friends’ feed if there are
many in a row from the same person, so they might not even see them all if they
don’t explicitly click the link to see more.
A nice feature in TweetDeck (the PC version, not
the more limited iPhone/iPad version) is that you can enter a post and then
schedule it to be posted later.
6: It’s not all about you
Maybe you think that since you’re promoting
yourself (or your business), all you need to do is post about what you’re doing. I see
people who put out post after post about themselves but never seem to participate
in the discussions or otherwise indicate that they’re also reading
their friends’ posts.
Social networking is designed to be interactive — it’s most effective
when you don’t just use it as a broadcast medium for one-to-many messages, but also
truly interact with your contacts. That means letting them know that you’re reading their
posts, whether by posting comments, hitting the Like link, retweeting their
relevant posts, or sending direct messages. This is the way you really connect — and it’s those two-way
connections that are most likely to benefit your career or business.
7: Strike a balance
The content of your posts counts. While you
shouldn’t get too personal, you shouldn’t be too business-like, either. That is, your
contacts don’t want to just see post after post about the product or service you
provide, until it seems that it’s just spam. They’ll unfollow or “hide” you pretty quickly if that happens.
Let your business associates get to know you a
little — the professional you, that is. Post occasionally about your
activities that are relevant to your business. For instance, you can post the
funny story about what happened to you on the plane on the way to a business
conference. Or you can post about the great book you just read about your area
of expertise. Even though these don’t directly promote your business, they provide a
glimpse of you as a person, without getting overly personal. People like to do
business with people they know.
8: Don’t just link
Some people use their social networking sites to
post links — lots and lots of links. When those links are relevant to your
business, that’s great, but it’s not enough. Think of how you feel when you go to a Web site that’s nothing but links
to other Web sites. Do you see that site as a real resource or just as a way
station for getting to the real resources?
Use the link as a way to highlight your own
expertise and opinions and to (subtly) help promote yourself. If you find a
great article about a topic in your field of interest/work, instead of just
tweeting the URL, post the URL in your blog along with a one- or two-paragraph
summary of your thoughts about the article. What parts are best? Are there
statements made with which you disagree? Can you give a real-world example of
some concept the article discusses? Then your tweets and FB posts can point to
your blog post instead of the original article, which gets you more hits on
your blog and more important, makes the readers think of you more as a
collaborator/content provider/expert commentator rather than just someone who
posted a URL.
9: Dress it up with multimedia
Sometimes, words just aren’t enough — and often they don’t stick in a person’s mind nearly as
long, nor as positively, as visual images do. Today’s social networking
services make it easy to dress up your posts with more than just text, and
those features aren’t just for sharing pictures of your pets and your family vacation.
Are you a consultant, posting about a recent
high-profile project? Add a few photos taken onsite (with the permission of the
client, of course — who’s likely to be happy to get the free advertising). If a picture is
worth a thousand words, what’s a video worth? Want to promote your reputation as a freelance
software developer? How about a video tutorial showing what your latest app can
do?
10: Use paid advertising wisely
Many of the social networking sites, such as
Facebook, support themselves by taking paid advertising. You can buy an ad; the
advantage of this is that it will appear on the pages of people you don’t know. It’s a way to
introduce yourself and your business to strangers without sending them friend
requests (which many will ignore and consider rude coming from people they don’t know). The key
here is to make the ad interesting and intriguing enough to draw them to your
own site. Otherwise, it will be ignored, as most online advertising is.
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