Social Networks

Sarah Worsham / May 12, 2009

Social Networking for Referrals

Many companies get the highest conversion rates (and best customers) from referrals. People tend to trust their friends, family and colleagues over companies – that’s a given. So, it may be in your company’s interest to use social networking to gain referrals. Like networking in person, social networking for referals involves quite a bit of relationship development and communication. People need to get to know you before they’ll be willing to recommend you to anyone else.

Social networking for referrals also means being on the networks where your potential referrals will be. And if you provide products and services to other businesses – this probably means other businesses. So, for this social networking purpose, it’s not about where your customers are on the social networks – it’s about where the referrals or other businesses are. This means it may make sense to dedicate some resources (time & effort) to networking and building relationships on business networks.

So if your business relies heavily on referrals for new sales, you may want to look where your potential referrals are, instead or in addition to where your potential customers are.

(photo by Athena’s pix @ Flickr CC)

Technorati tags: social networking, referrals, leads, business, lead generation, marketing

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Sarah Worsham / Apr 14, 2009

Selling (and Socializing) on Facebook

My article on Facebook for eCommerce sites – Selling (and Socializing) on Facebook – is up over at Practical eCommerce. I hope you find it interesting and useful.

But the real power is in what Facebook inherently offers – the ability to socialize and communicate directly with your customers Once customers become a fan, or join your group, you can send them messages, updates and news. Most importantly, you can see exactly who they are and can reach out to them to gather information about why they like your products and what can be improved. – Selling (and Socializing) on Facebook – Practical eCommerce

You can see the other articles I’ve written for Practical eCommerce here.

Sarah Worsham / Apr 7, 2009

All Your Tweet Belong To Us

All Your Tweet is a free service (currently in beta) that aims to aggregate various Twitter services into one place. Fairly basic functions such as follow, unfollow are offered, along with basic analytics (followers, friends, favorites, status updates) for multiple accounts. A web-based twitter client integrates all accounts into one dashboard, with URL shortening and tracking, and the ability to integrate RSS feeds into Tweets. Scheduling future tweets is also a really nice addition.

When I demoed All Your Tweet, the interface seemed a bit confusing with links at the top and Action links along the left. Some of the links are only available from the dashboard, which makes changing between “Actions” difficult. The web-based Twitter client is nice, but while it constantly updates times, it didn’t seem to always update tweets (those were in batches). So the time updates are a confusing illusion that it is actually constantly refreshing. Having analytics on the side was nice, but not something that was needed while tweeting. Most disappointing, I couldn’t get the RSS feed to work properly – although this may be due to recent problems with Twitter.

All Your Tweet has some really nice functions and I’d like to see them make the interface more robust and easy-to-use. It has the potential to be a pretty useful social marketing tool.

Have you tried All Your Tweet? What are your thoughts?

Technorati tags: all your tweet, social media, internet marketing, social media marketing, business, social networks, marketing

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