BC Business
social media how to
Social media provide a powerful new way to meet people, start conversations, and do business – if you know what you're doing. The first step? Pitch your tent. Think of your blog as your campsite – the first thing you set up when your plan is to conquer the vast and unforgiving wilderness of the Web. Stake out your territory and pitch your tent as soon as possible. The point is to own that space and keep it vibrant. After your camp is set up, you'll want to spread the word and invite people back to it.
Think of your blog as your campsite – the first thing you set up when your plan is to conquer the vast and unforgiving wilderness of the Web. Stake out your territory and pitch your tent as soon as possible. The point is to own that space and keep it vibrant. After your camp is set up, you’ll want to spread the word and invite people back to it.
To do that, you need to establish other connections, just like a spider needs several points between which to string up a web. These nodes can come in the form of other blogs and industry sites, as well as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, to name a few.
It’s in the space between those nodes that your conversation, your branding, and eventually your business takes place. The more connections you have, the bigger and stronger your web, and the more customers you come knocking at your door.
As you build your web of conversation online, keep these ideas in mind:
The secret to blogging success is in being generous. Share your expertise in your posts, and don’t be afraid to link to others. Once your blog is established, you can leverage the power of social media, including Tweets, blog comments, and Facebook posts, to attract tons more attention – all in the good name of helping people.
Do you know where your customers hang out online? Think like them, search like them, and ask them where they go. You can also use tools like Google Blog Search to find more blogs on your topic. Comment and answer questions on the best ones, and always link back to your own site.
Use Twitter Search to locate, follow, and reply to people talking about your area of expertise. Offer help and advice, and link back to your blog whenever you can. Third-party applications like Hootsuite and TweetDeck make it easy to “listen” to conversations on Twitter and monitor keywords and mentions in real time.
LinkedIn Answers lets you “share your knowledge and help your network,” on the social-networking site for professionals, but it goes beyond that. Answering questions posed by the Linkedin community establishes your credibility and brings more traffic back to your profile and blog (see my earlier post on joining LinkedIn for more tips).
Start a fan page for your business, then join all the groups related to your industry and comment on their walls and posts the same way you’ve done on other sites. Setting up a Page only takes a couple of minutes and doesn’t cost a thing.
Unlike the Web of old, social media is anything but static. To be successful in the social media arena, you have to practice these habits continuously. If you want to win the messaging war, you have fight the blogging battle every week. In other words, simply pitching a tent isn’t going to cut it, no matter how strategic your territory – you need to keep that campfire burning brightly.