Social Networking Boost your Exposure
Social Networking Boost your online exposure
USING THE POWER OF THE
INTERNET TO NETWORK
If you've been trying to grow your business by attending as many “meet and
greets” as you can, you'll be happy to discover a better way: social
networking. Online social network sites, whether they are networks like
Facebook or Twitter, or social news sites like Digg, offer a myriad of
opportunities to meet and greet people all around the world, instead of just
your little corner of it.
These days, getting online can help you market yourself by increasing your
business exposure and helping you create core groups of friends and
acquaintances online without having to even gas up your car. You can build a
demographic of people interested in your products and services, and you can
learn where these people congregate too. The power of the Internet can work
exponentially to build exposure as people start to gather online and network
virtually.
MAKING CONTACTS
The backbone of a good marketing campaign in the contact list, and it's no
different on the Internet. Without a contact list, you don't know who is
interested enough to buy your products. Typically, the list can be composed
of people who have already bought your products, or who expressed
interest in your business by being put on a mailing list. Online, your email
manager can hold your contact list, and on social networking sites, it can be
your fans or friends that join you or follow you online. It can be anyone
within your demographic who has a potential to be a customer later too.
Unlike a list that people sign up to in a retail store, online people are going
to look at your profile first to decide whether they want to befriend you or
subscribe to your blog. You have to have some way to sell yourself online,
and that's typically through the profile and content of your website. And, you
have to make it easy for them to sign up.
INTRODUCE YOURSELF
Before you can even start to network or create a contact, you have to
introduce yourself. In real life, you would look someone in the eye as you
firmly shook their hand, and told them who you are. Online, you have to try to do the equivalent, except that you don't actually meet the other person.
It's all virtual.
So, you want to make a good impression, even when you are not online,
because you never know when someone will stop by. For that, you need to
put some careful thought into your profile and always include a picture of
yourself. You wouldn't try to meet a prospective customer with a bag over
your head or a picture of a cartoon pasted on it in real life, and doing that
on the Internet just makes it seem you don't want to be genuine.
Authenticity on social networks is highly valued, and the more you project
the image of who you really are, the better chance that you will link up with
people who share your values and interests. This is particularly important
online, where anyone can become your friend, even if they may have no
interest whatsoever in who you are, or what you do. So, you need to focus
your profile information and anything that you put online to develop the
demographic that you want.
DEMOGRAPHICS
You want to make sure everything you do helps you to tie into the
demographics that are most likely to help your Internet marketing, if that's
your aim. For that, you have to already have a good idea of who has an
interest in your products and services. Then, increase your exposure with
that crowd by joining groups, attending online events, and befriending
these people. Go where this group goes and make your presence felt online
by commenting, adding a link, and being personable.
You can also attract your demographic by helping to disseminate information
helpful to this group, even if it's not your own copy. You can post URLs and
keep people updated on things that interest them. Then, they will come to
your profile when they want news on particular topics of interest to them.
NETWORKING
Once you know you're attracting the right people into your fold, you can start
to network some more online. You can join blogs or create your own blog.
You can create a sales page on Facebook. You can hold a non-profit
fundraiser online. You can get noticed by the mainstream media. You might
even go viral. Any activity that you do online ends up being residual content
that stays up for the life of that website, adding to your credibility and fan
base. Every year, you can end up making more and more contacts, just
through the sheer power of inertia, in that something that you put in motion
will stay in motion until a greater force stops it.But, this doesn't just happen all by itself. In order to network successfully,
you have to adopt a strategy that is going to get you noticed. You have to
be consistent in posting and keeping up with people who comment, fan,
befriend, or follow you online. When you are first starting up, it is going to
take some time to promote yourself online, but once you start getting the
hang of it, it becomes easier and easier.
PROMOTION
Online promotion is as hard or as easy as you make it. Having a little money
to start can significantly reduce the amount of time you spend promoting
your content and yourself online. Otherwise, you will have to be the person
adding information and keeping up with everything. But, even then,
promotion online is far easier than promoting yourself in a real life situation,
because the power of the Internet increases your visibility.
Think about trying to get noticed in at a convention where 300 vendors are
all competing for the few thousand of people who show up. All the noise and
distraction might make it likely that you end up with fifty people noticing
you, if you just stand in your booth and wait for people to walk buy. If you
decide to add some element that increases your attractiveness, like a
giveaway contest at your booth, then you might end up attracting 100 or
more, doubling the amount of attention. Now, if you have four or five sales
people in your booth and they each go to different areas of the floor and
peddle your booth's offerings, they might persuade more people to visit, as
they promote the giveaway contest. But, still, you are going to be limited by
how many people actually walk to your booth and how many people enter
your contest, to determine how many contacts you make that day.
Using that same analogy, you now are one of millions of websites on the
Internet trying to grab some attention. Sounds impossible, doesn't it, especially
if you don't have a task force of sales people to direct traffic to your site. So,
what do you do? Well, you simply go to various corners of the Internet where
you know people in your demographics congregate, and you place a sign with a
link back to your virtual booth (website). If you can hire affiliates to help you do
that too, you have one heck of a powerful promotion machine set up to drive
large amounts of traffic back to your offerings.
Now, what if you got all your friends, fans, people who followed you to do
this all for free? Social networking can do that for you, if you know how to
promote on social networks in a fashion that is compelling and friendly. Just
be sure to offer them something that is of value and you will be able to
exploit the network of friends and people who link to you in a way that
seems almost magical – all for free. So, now your contact list isn't just for
potential customers, but it's also to start generating an unpaid sales force byappealing to the social networking aspect of information gathering
and dissemination.
REAL LIFE EXAMPLES USING SOCIAL
NETWORKING SITES
Now, that you understand what you are trying to do when you are on a
social networking site, let's offer some specific examples. Just keep in mind
that we won't be able to cover every possibility as the permutations are
endless and limited only by your creativity. Every day, someone thinks up a
new way, using a new social networking site, that enables them to boost
their traffic stream exponentially and then the crush to the exit door is on.
It's like a fire has been set and Internet marketers around the world seem to
pick these strategies up almost telepathically, but most likely, they are out
on webmaster and Internet marketing forums where new strategies are
being discussed. So, let's start with some very quick examples on very well
known social networks and give you a few that aren't as well known to get
your creative juices flowing. Pretty soon, you will understand the basis is
always the same, and you can do it with any site. To recap,
1. Create a landing page for your offer or website,
2. Creatively market to get contact information,
3. Promote your link on social network sites,
4. Try to get others to promote for you too, for free.
You can set up a profile fairly easily on Facebook and hook into all the
people you know just by downloading your email address book. They will be
invited to friend you and once they do, you have a good basis to start
generating more friends. So, create a compelling and attractive profile that
falls in line with the demographic you are trying to attract. Then, once you
have a core group of friends, so you don't look socially inept, you can start
to try and figure out how to get more contacts within your specific
demographic so that you can start promoting your offerings.
Before we start to get into that, just be aware that spamming people or
soliciting them directly is against the terms of the service agreement. You
will have to start to engage in the art of the soft sell in order to be able to
work within Facebook. One key to making more friends is not to put up a
profile that labels you as an online Internet marketer right away. People do
check out the profile to figure out why you want to friend them, and if they see that, they are likely to run the other way. Make it authentic, but be more
casual, friendly, and less business oriented.
Okay, you've joined and now you want to start building exposure. Again, the
key is to get more contacts into your contact list. You'll be limited to 5,000
in Facebook, so make it good, but there are other ways to go beyond that
limit and remain on Facebook. One thing you don't want to do is ADD TOO
MANY FRIENDS AT ONCE. This is a red flag to the Facebook administrators
who will ban your account for being a spammer. So, let's repeat:
When adding friends, choose only 20 or 30 a day so as not to
get yourself banned!
BUILDING CONTACTS IN FACEBOOK
Here are few ways to start building contacts in your demographics
to increase your online exposure:
Join the right networks – When you first start, Facebook will ask
you to pick a network(s), which will either be a school or a
geographical location. Pick an area where you are thinking of doing
the most business, or where you have the most contacts. Once in that
network, you can get friends from there by browsing profiles that area
available for people within that network.
Leverage friends of friends – So, you've signed up, gotten a few
friends, and noticed that (wow!) one of your friends has thousands of
friends. Take a look at the friends list and see if you know of any or if
they are in your network. Then, ask them to friend you. Remember to
keep it slow and steady, less than 20 or 30 a day.
Join groups – Join groups and then post to the wall. Befriend group
members in the same group. There are even groups for people with
no friends who want more friends, but that's not targeted to your
demographic. You should pick a group that is targeted to your
demographic.
Have fun! - Set up applications and join fun games and activities
that expose you to more people online. It's best to pick an application
that has something to do with your niche, so that you are attracting
the right core group. So, if you were interested in marketing green
products, you might join the L'il Green application to meet more
people there by maintaining their online plants. There are literally
thousands of applications you can investigate and leverage to create
more friends on your targeted list.PROMOTING YOUR OFFERINGS ON FACEBOOK
Whether it's a website landing page, a blog with affiliate marketing, or
any other type of product or service you want to promote, you start with
the contact list. Then, you use the features of the site to help get the
word out by starting to use the features that tend to be more “newsy” and
viral. For Facebook, these features start the ball rolling quite nicely:
Status updates – There is a feature where you get to broadcast to
your friends what you are doing. You can also add links there to
different pages on the Internet. Try to include valuable information
and not just a link to a sales page, because it can get you some
unwanted notice from the admins. But, other than that, you can use it
to lead traffic back to your website, blogs, articles, and any other
content you want to promote on the web.
Comment on other people's updates – What's the point of sending
out information only to your own friends? Why not hook into other
friends and add a link where appropriate? When you comment on the
status, it goes into the newsfeed and their friends see it too. It also
gets put on their wall. Just don't spam or solicit overtly and you
should be fine.
Share a link, post – Like some web post you saw online? Why
not share the link or post on your wall? Your friends will see it in
the newsfeed and it will stay on your wall too.
Upload photos and comment – Photos tend to gather much more
attention than text. So, add some good photos and link them to
your niche or market. If they get commented on a lot, they can go
viral fairly quickly.
Create your own application – It's not as hard as it sounds since
it's basically just a collection of images. Then, you add it to the
application market place and wait for others to install it. You can put
your URL in various places and gather a lot of promotion this way.
Promote a blog on Facebook – There are a number of people who
have set up blog networks on Facebook and can be a great way to
network your blog with other bloggers, create more friends from
subscribers, and promote the heck out of your blog. If your blog has
advertising on it, you can even make some nice change.
Twitter is the nanobyte social network for people with attention-deficit
disorder. Seriously, it is a very curt way to keep in touch with people by
sending 140 character messages that can be “followed” by interested parties
all over the Internet. This may seem like the weirdest form of social network,
but it has landed people jobs in a matter of hours in a tight economy, and in
some cases, given people a virtual peek at a mass media event from a firsthand up-to-the-minute account of serial messages aptly labeled “tweets.”
BUILDING CONTACTS ON TWITTER
In order to build your contact list on Twitter, all you have to so is either add
your email list to search for them on Twitter, or you can search by name. You
can also just start with one friend you know, who knows mutual friends and
then start following them. Generally, when you follow someone, they do you
the courtesy of adding you to their follow list too. But, if you don't know
anyone on Twitter, and you only have a few friends there, how do you
expand your list, and more importantly make it targeted to a specific
demographic?
The answer isn't obvious because Twitter has no groups or categories that
people join. You can use the search box at the top right corner of Twitter to
search for locations, words, or names that might show up in a Twitter
profile, but not everyone really goes as far as to make a good profile.
Another way to do this is to use a tool called TweetScan. There you can search
topics, people, places, and everything. This looks for these items within the
tweets and so you can find better demographics this way. And, if you're not
sure, when you add a person, whether they're a friend of a friend or found
through some other tool like TweetScan, all you have to do is follow
conversations for a while to figure out if they really are in your demographic.
PROMOTING YOUR OFFERINGS ON TWITTER
Here again, you can't spam people. You're going to use some of the same
strategies, though, to get more exposure. Exposure here would be the
number of people following your tweets, not the number of tweets you
follow. So, to promote yourself, you have to join the conversation! You want
to start posting some interesting conversation related to the demographic
you are trying to target in 140 character chunks. The more people who get
interested in your feed, the more people follow you.
There are groups that you can join also outside of Twitter that get many of
their members from Twitter. This would be a perfect example of getting
into an area where you can harvest followers. All you have to do is find
such groups, join them, and then get them to follow you too.Since there are no obvious groups on Twitter, you can find some that
specialize in grouping Twitter feeds by category topic or location, and they
also allow you to add your URL there too! That's a perfect way to promote
your Twitter feed. Once such place is a wiki called Twitterpacks and is
located at Since you're limited to 165 characters, it becomes even more important to
make the links you post in the tweet as small as possible. You can do this
using services like which coverts longer URLs into
more manageable links. This is indispensable if you are tweeting about some
new post or site you've updated with your marketing offerings. Just
remember not to do this all the time, or you'll be labeled a spammer and
your followers will dump you pronto, probably not soon after they report you
to the administrators. So, while you can do this off and on, doing it 100% of
the time is a sure way to get your account bumped. The same is true if you
follow too many people at one time or add too many followers at one time.
These are classic red signals that you are a spammer and unwelcome in
social networking sites. So, keep it real and keep it cozy To automate some of your promotions, you can use tools like TweetDeck
and Tweetlater, at respectively. These tools will allow you to
schedule your tweets, shorten your URLs automatically without going to
tinyurl and they can help you manage your followers by sending out
autoresponder direct messages and following anyone automatically who
follows you. That's a whole lot of work that you don't have to do, and yet it
gives you the feel of being present within the social network as often as you
want, without having to sit at your computer while doing it.
SOCIAL BOOKMARKING
Often, people don't understand the power of social bookmarking. They think
it's rather strange to sit and submit URLs to bookmark sites. They don't see the
point, until those sites start to bring in readers and traffic back to the original
URL. Then, the light bulb goes on, and they are trying to locate as many social
bookmarking sites out there as they can and trying to tag and submit
whenever possible. Here we'll discuss some of the great social bookmarking
sites out there AND also how to automate the process for you and your
readers, so that you put your online exposure into hyperdrive.
Here are some of the best social bookmarking sites out there:
Digg
This is a social news site where you add content that is rated by other
people online. The higher your rating, the more likelihood you land on the front page of Digg and get massive Internet exposure. And, it
never hurts to get just a few thumbs up on your content either. This
is located at
Newsvine
Some of the major mainstream media are trying to incorporate some
social discussion boards into their stories. You can sign up for an
account and you can also submit bookmarked pages to them. This
one is located at Sometimes it seems like there are more social bookmarking sites than there
are pores on our skin, and we can't possibly link into all of them. However,
you can get a tool that allows you to submit to at least 47 of the major social
bookmarking sites in 10 to 20 minutes, by automating the entire process.
This can really ramp up your exposure, and it keeps you from having to
learn every new interface and social bookmarking site out there.
So while social bookmarking doesn't really help you to make contacts, it's
an excellent tool for promotion purposes.
SOCIAL GROUPS, NETWORKS
You can also join any number of individually owned or non-profit groups and
social networks that are sprouting up all over the place. Try to pick ones
that have the same market niche as your website offerings. Once you join,
you need to actively participate, in order to be valued as an expert or person
of interest and to get more attention. So, there are a few things you need to
keep in mind as you are out traveling the social network highway.
BE AUTHENTIC
Social networks are not for putting out a fake marketing image. That quickly
gets you disrespected and dropped as a friend. Put up a good photo of
yourself as next to no photo, icons and cartoons, tend to also draw very
little attention. It makes it seem as if you're hiding behind a mask and
people relate better to images of other people instead of pictures that have
no personal meaning.
KEEP THE CONVERSATION TONE CASUAL
This isn't a marketing presentation, nor a slick sales trick. It's a relationship
between you and another human being. So, keep the conversation style friendly
and casual. By all means, do not post or write anything that is going to reflect
badly on you, no matter how irate someone else might be. Instead,you do have the option to drop people who are flamers or trying to bait you
into arguments.
MAKE YOUR LINKS INTERESTING
Your links are what are going to drive traffic back to your offerings, so make
them interesting. Don't just say, “Click here.” No one is going to do that.
Instead, comment briefly on the link in a casual, conversational, tone and let
people find out for themselves if it's what you think. For instance, you can say,
if you are selling mortgage loans, “Top 10 reasons you're decline for a mortage”
and then offer the link. If you do this in a status update, you will find that
people having this issue will click into it. And, if your page also has a program
they can join to fix their credit or get approved, hey, that's great, right? You've
just solved a customer's problem and made some money too!
SHOW OFF YOUR EXPERTISE
It's funny, but in real life, you'd be the bore of the party if you just spouted
off everything you knew or offered URLs to places with pithy information.
Online, you become the party hound with this style because people are
HUNGRY for relevant and timely news that provides real solutions to their
life. They wouldn't be on there otherwise. If you can prove that you are the
expert in your particular market niche, people will come to you when they
have a problem, look things up in your blogs, your website, your social
networking profiles or email you directly. So, be sure to be accessible and be
sure to show off your expertise too.
APPEAL TO IDENTITY
Lastly, the #1 reason people like social networks is because it appeals to
their identity. They get to talk about who they are, what they like, and what
makes them tick. Exploit that and really listen to what your friends and
connections are saying to you. You can even set up polls to get their input
on what they like best about their cars, if you are selling cars online, what
feature of health drinks are the best (vitamins, taste, exotic, minerals) and
offer them a free discount coupon on the next purchase of you Acai berry
juice that you sell online. The trick is to get them to start talking about
themselves and then offer some way to tie that into your market niche.
Doing that, you will have tons of people lining up to give you not only
valuable market feedback, but probably taking you up on your offer to buy a
can of your health drink too. And, they will love you for it too.
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