Social Networking For Business
How To Attract People To You
By Bringing Value To The Conversation...
To use social networking for business promotion and building relationships, professionalism will help you hit the ground running. Professionalism will differentiate you from those who selfishly promote themselves, their products and their business opportunities. So what does it mean to be "professional?" Social Networking For Business: Know Your Target Market First First, you must know your target market. You must know who they are, what are they thinking about, talking about and what they need. What problems are they experiencing that you can help them solve? Knowing your target market is the first step in attracting a continuous stream of highly targeted prospects to you. You will be more effective, more confident and you can actually have more fun. But there is a specific formula. All you have to do is execute that formula. Not Having Your Own Domain Name Screams "Amateur!" Get your own domain name before you begin your social marketing activities. Nothing screams "amateur" like using some obscure, long url to send interested leads. You do not necessarily need a website to purchase a domain name. What you would do is have it forwarded. So, for example, if you were promoting a lead capture page for your network marketing opportunity, you don't want to promote it using your affiliate url. So you would purchase a domain name and have it forwarded to your lead capture page when someone clicks on it. Domain names can be purchased for about $10 per year. Also, that domain name should speak to the target market you're trying to address. Get A Professional Email Address If you want to exude professionalism in social networks, you need to provide a way for prospects to contact you by email. Your email address, like your domain name, should speak to your target market. JoeBlo@yahoo or johnpublic@gmail does not do the trick. When someone sees this from someone professing to be a business person they wonder if you are a "fly-by-night" huckster or just a rank amateur. Tip: If your domain name is socialguru.com, a good example of an email address name might be, joe@socialguru.com.
Social Networking For Business: Avoid The Pitfalls
Social marketing requires you to add value to the internet community. Just as in the offline world, if you go around pitching your deal to everyone they will soon hate to see you coming. The people in the social networking community will just ignore you or worse, you could get banned from certain networks for "spamming."To add value, provide useful information. If you read a book and it is related to your target market you may want to write an article about that book and share your thoughts on it. It should never be all about you. Share your experience, your knowledge and your passions. Key here is building relationships. You will never build a solid relationship with people if you are always trying to sell them something. Give first and people will want to buy. Promote more than one site. Setting up more than one website is easier than you think. I'm not talking about comprehensive huge sites, but rather very simple sites.
Social Networking For Business: Where To Start
To get started social networking for business, you want to get your accounts set up at various sites in the particular venues you want to work in. Below are some examples of different types of sites where you can begin generating some content and building mutually profitable relationships.
Content Sharing (Squidoo)
Writing Articles (EzineArticles)
Book Marking (Digg)
Social Sites (Facebook)
Video Sharing (Youtube)
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