Are you ready to stop chasing the next dollar and start really building a business through social networking? Than these are 4 invaluable tips you must adopt today.
Before you can solidify your decision to take your business’s social networking to the next level you need to accept that this whole technology wave isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it has barely even started! There is probably some 13 year old kid in Wyoming messing around with an idea that is going to blow away everything we already think we know.
Everyone out there who is not only serious about their business’s online presence, but is also making money from it, understands this whole concept goes deeper than just setting up a website and a bunch of social media profiles. These people have taken these 4 steps that work wonderfully offline and implemented them online.
#1. Become an Attractive Member of the Community
Your presence is what makes you approachable. Your approachability is the determining factor to whether or not most people will choose to engage you further.
Build your name and your reputation into something that is appreciated and recognized, even if it is by only a few at first. Everything must start somewhere. The second you adopt the philosophy “I can’t achieve what they did,” you lost. McDonalds, Coca Cola, Oreo, and every other house hold name brand did not start out like that.
It is the little things compounded over time that establishes your reputation and creates massive success.
#2. Engage with others regularly
I have worked at home and I have had an office; do you know where my business grew the most? Panera Bread! Why? Because I was surrounded by people I didn’t know.
Every time I had a meeting over lunch or coffee I was engaging with the person I was meeting with, but more importantly I was engaging with everyone around me who could overhear my conversation. Meeting after meeting someone would approach me afterwards or sometimes even during the meeting, and ask for a card or pass me theirs for me to contact them.
Sharing, commenting, blogging, tweeting, re-tweeting, and all the other forms of communication we partake in online do not go unnoticed. Answering questions on LinkedIn, unconditionally (fancy way of saying don’t pitch to the people you respond to) has led to countless deals for so many people, because someone else with the same questions went back and read the thread and contacted the perceived expert.
#3. Know Where to Spend Time
If you have a lawn maintenance company it wouldn’t be the best use of your time to go to a health and wellness expo trolling for clients, right?
Learn how to categorize your contacts after doing your research.
Ninety plus percent of us are guilty of logging into Facebook and four hours later we are watching Youtube videos when we look up say “Whoa! Where did the day go?”
One of the coolest features in pretty much all the social networks you use for your business is lists. Once you have these lists created you don’t have to subject yourself to the noise of all the people, who are still valuable, but who you just have not yet researched. This will reduce your time messing around online exponentially.
(Click on Tutorials to learn more about list)
#4. Be Yourself
I love what Gary Vaynechuck says in this video, “When our grandparents did dumb $#!* it got lost in history, yea its gone. Everything you do wrong it’s gonna be known for ever.”
Let your personality shine through, sharing and posting things that you like, that are funny, or you just think is cool draws the attentions of those who dig the same stuff as you do.
There is absolutely, positively no cookie cutter business social media plan, or any internet marketing plan for that matter. You can talk to 10 facebook “experts” and get 10 different ideas/ strategies. Does that make 9 out of 10 wrong, NO!
Business social networking is a profitable way of marketing, the only downside for most businesses is that you need to stay on top of new trends. Please share any golden nuggets of your own below!
