Using social media to broaden your client base and expand your brand awareness is rapidly becoming a vehicle of choice for business promotion. Systematic use of social media can quickly and relatively easily broaden your exposure.
Using social media is not just for chatting about your personal life, political views, or other controversial subjects if that’s what you choose to do. But there are more important things to accomplish with the ever-growing popularity of social networks. Using them for business purposes has never been more wide-spread, nor is it difficult. You do need to try to keep your personal non-professional presence separated from your business interests, but that is easy enough to accomplish. Simply set up separate business accounts.
Be There
First, you need to have a presence, and a professional one apart from the congenial meeting place for casual conversation. You need to establish accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. And you also need to have a personal website blog. Yes, blogging takes a bit of time. But you can take it to the bank that this is time well spent.
Blogging Tips
- Post on your blog about breaking news items. Nothing is hotter than breaking news to garner a wave of interest from the widest variety of onlookers.
- If you have an important link (which, of course, you do), isolate it to its own line, and make the entire line the hot link.
- Include a relevant photo along with your logo. If you don’t have a logo, include your professional photo.
- Don’t neglect the possibility of adding comments of your own on other people’s blogs. This draws traffic, since you are including a link to your own blog, or perhaps to your Twitter account, which then directs them to your blog.
- As long as your topic is non-controversial, it may behoove you to make a prediction in your post. People love predictions. When you make a prognostication you set up a continuing possibility for dialog. You are pushing your post’s influence into the future. Long-term contact with readers is a valuable asset.
Your LinkedIn Presence
For professional promotion there is no more important place today that LinkedIn. At first this may seem to be counter-productive, but relationships can explode into an exponential growth rate fairly quickly here. What LinkedIn is best for is introductions. They are fast and easy, and can be targeted to a desired audience.
Here you can easily seek out your own introductions, in a way that strongly resembles the “cold-calling” popularly used in sales strategies. You should post these introductions on a regular basis, but first you need a productive and streamlined vehicle–your message. That message should include:
1. Effective Introduction: Begin your concise statement of intent with a crystal-clear title. Then introduce yourself professionally. Don’t be clever or cute. Avoid the frills and the fluff. Tell it like it is.
2. Elaborate Briefly: This second paragraph should include the reason why you are trying to connect with this person or organization. Brevity is important, but it is also important that they understand what you might be able to do for them if this connection is established. Mutual benefits can be stressed.
3. Closing Statement: Finish with a straightforward up-beat closing, in one or two sentences. The obvious call to action is that they should approve this connection for the mutually beneficial reasons you have stated. A simple professional ‘thank you’ is also appropriate.
Meeting marketing objectives by expanding your customer base through the use of social media can push your business strategies into the next gear. That is what EXTEND GROUP is all about–generating the positive results-driven strategies that drive your success.
