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Social Networking For Business: What Works
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Terry Brock, MBA, CSP
Terry Brock is a marketing coach, professional speaker and a syndicated columnist for business publications around the world. He writes about technology, marketing and the Internet weekly in his column Succeeding Today. In addition to that he provides unique insight into living life and doing business successfully. He has been in business since 1983 helping business leaders and professionals to achieve success.
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Social Media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and YouTube are changing the way the world does business. I think this is in response to our desire to connect with others. Relationship Marketing is all about connecting with people first as human beings and then as customers later. For a real business relationship to work, both parties must receive value. If only one or neither does, that relationship won’t continue for long.
It is the same with Social Networking. You have to provide value consistently for people to want to follow you (as in Twitter) or be your “friend” (as in Facebook. This value means something that helps them in their business or their personal lives.
So, what Works in Social Media and Social Networking?
What To Do In Social Networking
1. Provide Solid Value First. Provide tips that are valuable to your followers. If you talk about a special that is with a third party
2. Retweet (Twitter). This means you copy something that was said by one person and send it to your followers. You are helping in three ways here: 1) You help the person who sent the initial tweet and they will remember that, 2) You help your followers by providing value and 3) You help yourself two ways. First you strengthen the relationship with the person you are retweeting (don’t you love these new words we come up with today?) and secondly you help yourself as others see you as a resource. Make sure it is value when you retweet otherwise it comes off as TweetSpam and that can only hurt you.
3. Link With Bit.Ly, Tinyurl Or Other URL Shorteners. This sounds a bit technical but it’s quite easy. If you have a really long name for a website (URL) it can eat up your 140 character limit fast. A better way is to use one of the free URL shorteners available. Bit.ly is good for generating statistics on how many are coming to the site. Tinyurl and snipurl have been around for years and are quite reliable.
4. Always Points To More Value On Your Blog/Website. Let your Facebook postings, your tweets and Linkedin messages always point to your Blog or website (they can be the same) where your followers or friends will find more value on the subject. This is the methodology you want to deploy in your marketing today. Generate value on your Blog and point to it with your notices on all the various social networking sites.
