Building a social media audience can be the cornerstone of your program. Michael Jones, President of Userplace in Los Angles, gives us very good information about how to get started. “The key to using a business network successfully involves the creation of your personal friends — or business connections — group. The registration process is similar across the various social networking websites, but LinkedIn boasts one of the simplest methods of inviting and maintaining your social network. By simply uploading an exported file from your contact manager, LinkedIn can immediately tell which friends of yours are members of the service. This method of contact maintenance and connection group development makes LinkedIn a breeze to start with, immediately enabling you to gain access to your contacts, without having to laboriously enter emails to discover if associates are already there.” Here are some other things you can do to get started:
Complete your profiles on the sites you select
Upload your contact information
Provide meaningful content
Create compelling, keyword-rich content
Write short papers on key issues
Provide product launch announcements
Introduce new solutions or services
Don’t post confidential information
Create conversations about your products or solutions
Manage the social media program, don’t just let it go
Another way to get started is to just get set up in one program and use it for a period of time. Just remember, people are talking about your industry or even your company. A good way to find this out is go to Google and type in your company’s name with the word sucks, or poor service. Try doing the same for your competitors, you may be surprised.
Social networking truly is the new way to market and create an extraordinary number of relationships. With print media on the decline and the number of web based networks growing, this is one medium that is demanding attention as it grows. Remember you want to develop a strategy based on your mission. Daily management of your program will ensure that you grow your influence and business.
Bob Lilly