Sazbean

Software Development Management

Main navigation

You are here: Home / Archives for social networking

social networking

/

Using Social Networks for Business – Now what?

Now that you’ve done some thinking about what your business goals are for social networking and investigated where your target audience is…

What will be the reaction to your message?

If You’ll Be Joining Existing Communities…

If you’ve decided to use existing communities and social networks to connect with your audience, take care not to put them all off by posting about how great your company/products/services are.  You’ll need to approach social networking as a way to help your customers (which will also help you).  Start by answering questions and trying to be as helpful as possible.  If the community allows you a profile page – fill it out and post blog entries if possible.  Once you’ve established a reputation for being helpful, you can make some inquiries of the community (to try to accomplish some of your business goals), be they feedback, reviews, etc (obviously some goals won’t require any inquiries if they’re directed towards increasing sales & traffic).

If You’ll Be Starting Your Own Community…

Starting your own community is the most difficult way to go, but sometimes it is the only way to reach your intended audience.  You will need a fairly large time committment to post content (lots of it), market and champion your network.  If you can enlist the help of some fairly vocal customers, it will help your cause (in terms of both effort and reputation).  Since a large part of the initial content will probably be posted by you, again concentrate on helping your audience.  Post frequently asked questions (FAQs) with answers, blogs about what the company is doing, and information to help with your products and services.

Help Your Customers

Hopefully you’ve noticed the common thread: using social networks should be about helping your customers.  Helping them should lead to help for you and will give you a reputation for caring and listening when you need to ask them for assistance.

Other Posts in this series:

What Social Networks Should I Join to Promote My Business?

Using Social Networks for Business – What Are Your Goals?

Using Social Networks for Business – Where Are You?

Technorati Tags: , ,

/

Using Social Networks for Business – Where Are You?

Where are the people I’m trying to reach?

This is also an important question because there are a limited number of hours in the day and we need to put our efforts into what makes sense for our business.  Just because you heard about MySpace in the news doesn’t mean that your audience of roofing contractors is there or has even heard about it.  You’ll need to do a little research to find out where your audience is.

Here are some places to look:

  • Start with publications focused at your audience – their websites often offer or link to a existing community.
  • Look to see if there are dedicated groups on existing social networks (like Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn, etc).
  • Use Google to search for your industry name to see if any other websites have or link to a network.
  • Try a blog search to find blogs (try Google Blog Search or Technorati) in your industry – they often have communities or link to them.
  • Ask professionals in your industry if they know of any online communities.

If you still come up blank it may be that there isn’t a community for your industry (yet).  Before you run off to start your own community, it is also important to understand your audience.  Are they even online?  Do they just read websites or will they create content and join the conversation?  The Profile tool at the Groundswell site can help you understand the tendencies of your audience.

Other posts in this series:

What Social Networks Should I Join to Promote My Business?

Using Social Networks for Business – What Are Your Goals?

Technorati Tags: , ,

/

Using Social Networks for Business – What Are Your Goals?

In the first post of this series, What Social Networks Should I Join to Promote My Business Website?, I gave an overview of some questions you should ask (and try to answer) to decide which social networks are best for your business.  The first question, is the most important:

What goal or problem am I trying to solve?

It may help to take a look at some possible answers:

  1. Increase Sales
  2. Increase Traffic to the Website – Why?  This is a common answer, but what does more traffic give you?  One would hope you’re actually trying to increase sales (see #1).
  3. Increase Customer Satisfaction – Good.  This should also lead to #1.
  4. Need more information on how our products/services are doing.  – Also good (and should lead to #1 – see a trend?)

Businesses often lose sight of their main goal – to increase sales.  Don’t become bogged down with all these new technologies and buzz words.  If sales are hurting because you have a customer serice or research problem, then use social networks and your website to solve that problem.

Take a deep breath.  Visualize what you’re trying to do and why.  Now we have a good foundation to move forward.

Technorati Tags: , ,