Traditional Marketing Methods Still Apply
When creating a Social Media Strategy
The first step to turning your networking and social media strategy into a success is to identify your target market. Next you must select businesses and individuals within your target market, so that you can take action to connect with them and build mutually beneficial relationships.
Once you know who your target market is and you have identified the businesses that you feel will support your vision. You must identify tools that will help you to identify the right people in your target market. These are people with whom you can form strategic business alliances, joint ventures or who are influencers in businesses with which you want to do business.
Some of the tools that will be of value are:
1. Twellow.com is a great tool to find twitter users by means of some carefully selected key words in their bio, category or location. This will allow you to find people that are aligned with the vision of your business.
2. LinkedIn is also a great resource. As a free user you can carry out a number of useful searches that will help you to find and connect with the right people. You can upgrade your Linked in account, which will give you access to a number of very useful tools that will help you find the right people to network and connect with.
3. Identifying and joining LinkedIn groups is also a great way to identify and connect with the right people.
4. Use search.twitter.com to search for conversations that are relevant to your goals. You can then join these conversations. Contribute real value to the conversation and you will appear authentic and real. You will become someone that they will want connect with.
5. Make sure that you have all your social media profiles printed on the back of your business cards. This makes it far easier for people you meet to continue the conversation with you after the event.
6. Ensure that you have an up to date photograph on your business card so that people can easily identify you on the various social media sites.
All these strategies will help you to continue communicating with people long after networking events. This connection will be the catalyst for you to turn in person networking into sustained online networking and meaningful connection.
I am sure that you are like me and that you meet really important people that can help and support you. The challenge we all face is finding and making the time to actually turn these relationships into mutually beneficial long term connections. We get so wrapped up in our busy lives that we never find time to do what we know is really important. Becoming super achievers is about doing a few things consistently over a long period of time. Building connection with people is no different; it requires consistent effort and regular contact. It is only about one to two dozen people that are going to make a real difference in your life.
To streamline this crucial process and remove the guess work from the process. I have devised a simple weekly strategy where I plan to do the following each week:
1. Meet in person for a drink or lunch with three important contacts. This is planned and scheduled each Friday afternoon.
2. Connect with 15 important contacts via the internet. This can be a comment on their blog, a targeted email or via their social media platform.
3. I send a gift to one important person. This is not a gift because I feel obliged, it is a carefully thought out gift with meaning. The recipient is always really pleased with the unexpected gift and they will feel more connected with you after receiving it.
Author: Andrew Horton Inspirational Speakers
No comments:
Post a Comment