Archive for Social Networking
How to Properly Network on Facebook
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Facebook is the largest social networking platform on the web, and it’s also one of the single top performing, most visited websites of any kind. There are literally hundreds of millions of regular users around the world. All of this means that there is a huge opportunity for you to use the service as a networking platform. If done correctly you can tap into an atmosphere filled with potential prospects and partners.
One of the first steps in networking correctly on Facebook is to make sure you go about setting up your own profile and your own settings correctly. You want to be open, approachable and friendly, but you also need to maintain your professionalism. This means that you need to watch what you say, be careful about the pictures you post and generally conduct yourself as you would if you were around a bunch of important business colleagues in person.
If you’re also using Facebook as a tool to connect with your friends and family that shouldn’t be a problem either. You can create groups and different settings for the visibility of your profile and certain information depending on those various group settings. For example, you can open up certain elements to people you classify as “friends” while everybody else you are connected with would not have that information available to them.
It’s also important with Facebook that you go ahead and set up a fan page for your business. This is where you can specifically make a page that’s about your business, whereas your own private page has to be focused more entirely on yourself.
With a fan page, you can entice people to check out your website or interact with your business in other ways, you can give them more information and details about promotions, current events or anything else that you had in mind. You can also design the page to look basically like anything you’d like, so you can get creative and you can end up with a page that you’re proud of.
The two of these don’t have to be mutually exclusive, in fact a great fan page and a great profile will work in conjunction with one another. The fan page is where your business can shine, and your own personal profile is where you can individually interact with potential prospects and other interested parties. Some people may head straight from the business, other people may first be looking to establish a trusting relationship and so forth. Therefore they each play their part and they both are important to your success.
Do not forget to join other groups while you’re on Facebook either. You should find a wealth of other prominent groups related to your industry, niche or field that already exist. By joining these groups you can immediately gain access to hundreds and potentially thousands of people who are assuredly interested or involved with what you’re doing.
Once you join these groups it’s important that you actually get involved and go ahead interacting with other members. Share ideas, make comments, post useful links and above all don’t excessively self-promote. You want to be a useful, contributing and insightful member that people respect and rely upon.
That is something that stays true from site to site, no matter where you’re spending your time online or in the social media, web 2.0 world. You can’t just be a drone for your business, and you can’t just advertise and promote. You have to get involved, form relationships, establish trust and provide value for people. In this way social networking is much as it is in the real world. It’s about building bonds and relationships, offering opportunities to people that they want to take advantage of and creating a positive atmosphere for yourself that you can succeed in.
You could ask a hundred different people and get a hundred different responses for how you should properly network on Facebook. But the key factors listed above will largely say the same. Set up your profile and page correctly, join other groups, interact with others and ultimately get your name out there and get in touch with a wide range of people. When done correctly, there is an unlimited potential for networking on Facebook.
Offline Marketing Strategies for Your Online Business
Posted by: | CommentsMany small business owners fail to successfully connect their online business with the offline world. What this means is that they either don’t realize that online businesses can be promoted with offline strategies, or they don’t know how to make it work for their specific situations. The truth is that many traditional forms of offline advertising and marketing strategies can be extremely successful for businesses that are entirely online based.
It’s easy to get caught up in the world of online marketing when you are running an Internet business. Indeed, 
succeeding in the areas of search engine optimization, social networking and PPC campaigns are all extremely important to the success of your business. Additionally, they are all extremely cost effective forms of advertising and promotion that enable you to reach a potentially huge market. No online business would be wise to avoid online marketing.
However that doesn’t mean that you have to forgo offline marketing or traditional advertising altogether. In fact, what is consistently proven time and time again is that the most successful businesses form comprehensive marketing plans that incorporate many different tactics and platforms. Including offline advertising into your online marketing plan is simply a smart way to broaden your horizons and diversify your plan of attack.
The most important thing you have to remember though is that not all offline advertising opportunities make sense for online businesses. The trick is finding the ones that work for your particular business or industry. There is a huge variety of different options, including newspaper ads, trade magazines, conferences and tradeshows, post cards, radio advertising and more. So how is your online business supposed to find the platforms that work best?
Just as with your online marketing work, you are looking for cost effective, efficient and highly targeted forms of advertising, marketing and promotion. In the world of search engine optimization you wouldn’t try to target the broad search market of “cars” when what you are really offering is “vintage car auctions in New York”.
You would be facing far too much competition, and the costs of your efforts will be significantly higher. Additionally, the people who eventually find you may not be interested at all in what you have to offer. They may be looking for “car repair shops” “cars with the best gas mileage” or anything else.
Of course the same rules apply when you are working with offline marketing. You want to target your market as effectively as possible, and reach out to your potential prospects and customers in the places where you are most likely to find them and where they are most likely to listen to what you have to say. This will help you keep your costs down while providing yourself a better shot at actually reaching out to interested parties.
The offline methods of marketing you choose have to have clear, tangible benefits for your business. Just advertising and opening up your budget for the sake of it isn’t going to get you anywhere. Instead you need to think about what you specifically are trying to accomplish and then devise ways of making that happen.
Are you trying to add 1,000 new names to your email list so that you can grow your presence and find new prospects? Are you trying to promote a new product or service you just released? Are you offering a limited time discount or promotion designed to get customers into your doors with the hopes of selling to them repeatedly over time?
Whatever you are trying to accomplish, the first step is specifically plotting out your desired results. From there, you can find the quickest and most cost efficient ways of achieving that goal. To find 10 or 20 highly valuable prospects a tradeshow or conference may be the best route, but to send as much traffic as possible to your website a newspaper or radio ad may make more sense.
Think about your goals, keep your budget in mind and then choose the offline marketing strategy that fits the best with what you are going for. Remember, online businesses aren’t restricted to the online world. There is no unwritten rule that says a website can’t promote itself using traditional methods. So dive into the world of offline marketing for a way to increase the success of your online business.
