Social Networking Your First Post
| Social Networking Your First Post Part 1 |
| The basics |
| Social networking may be a new term for a lot of you, but many if not most of you already do it. Think of social networking as you would to the many “networking groups” and “breakfast groups” that many of you already participate in. You know the ones where you meet the last Thursday of the month and trade ideas and offer your services to other group members. Social Networking is the same thing only multiplied by thousands if not millions. The other difference is the fact that you do this online and it can be done on a daily basis if you choose to do so. |
| When using Social Networking the first thing you’ll notice is that it is much easier to speak to your entire group. If you have anxiety speaking in public, this anxiety will no longer affect you because you now write your message. Keep in mind the anxiety may be gone, but you must provide good, useful content for your group. Another difference with Social Networking is that instead of passing out business cards like you do at the monthly meetings, you can now provide a short paragraph about your self your company and your services with a link to your site. This is usually called your Bio. You should also take advantage of your signature at the end of each post, that will have your name, your contact info and another link to your site. Be careful not oversell in your bio and signature. Keep it short and concise, otherwise some members may view it as spam and totally ignore your postings. |
| Find a Social Networking Group |
| Let’s explore how we actually go about participating in a Social Networking group. The first thing you need to do is find a site that will allow you to join and participate in the group. Make sure it’s a public group and not Private. Most groups are always looking for folks to participate, because it creates more content which in turn will create a better ranking in the major search engines. |
| We are going to use MySpace to find a Social Networking Group we can join. If you go to the groups section in MySpace you can type in your keywords and search for groups. In the search results, you will want to primarily look at the membership of each group before selecting the group you want to join. Keep in mind that there are groups out there that may have 10 or 15 members that actually have 10 or 15 member, but a lot of the groups will create multiple profiles to make it look like there are members. So make sure you pick a group that has at least 40 or more members. The one we are going to select is the Business Buddies of Tampa. The membership is over 500 and once you take a look at the group you can tell there are a lot of different businesses in the group. |
| In part 2 We will go over the actual post and a list of different Social Networking Sites to join. Until Next time… |
