This week, Techie Guru, Vanessa Rothwell, shares her top social networking tips.
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock you have probably heard of Facebook and Twitter by now. These days you need to be on these sites from a business point of view even if it doesn’t interest you personally. You might think “Do people really care what I’ve had for lunch?” Well no, they don’t – but by sharing about yourself, your insights and experiences, 
people will start to relate to you as a person and therefore be more interested in your products and services. It’s all about building a relationship, and with more than 500 million active users on facebook and 100 million Twitter users, you will most likely find your market on there.
Let’s take a look at 5 tips to start social networking like a “pro”:
- Write interesting status updates
Think about standing out from the crowd – don’t just share what you had for breakfast, share an opinion that gives people an insight into your personality. Keep your status updates positive and interesting and they are more likely to be a conversation starter. - Participate in other peoples conversations
Participating in conversations will help people begin to notice you. Put comments on other people updates on Facebook, or hit reply on twitter to tweet a comment. Add value to what others are saying (it doesn’t need to be about yourself). Even clicking “like” on other statuses, comments, updates will show you appreciate the comment even if you haven’t added anything. The benefit of this is by commenting on a post or just by clicking like, you will be seen by your friend’s friends and so on. - Don’t bombard others with your promotions
Even though Facebook and Twitter are great
business marketing tools, if you appear to be using them for that only you will turn people off as it’s a big social “faux pas” to continually push your promotions in the face of others. Adding a promotion only once every 3 or 4 updates or comments will keep the balance and show you are also there to give value to others. - Build relationships as you add friends
When adding friends especially if you don’t know them personally, write a personal comment to introduce yourself. Ensure you make the comment about them, not yourself, you will be more memorable that way. When accepting friends, adding a comment then will also help with relationship building. - Tag others to get noticed
On twitter and facebook you can tag someone by adding ‘@’ symbol in front of their name, This will appear on their page and in front on their friends which will help your visibility. It’s important
to do this in a controlled rather than random manner as you can also annoy people if you do it wrongly. Making a comment to that person by tagging them is the right way, randomly tagging many people on photos etc is the wrong way. Making it meaningful is the key.
Social networking is fast becoming one of the best and free ways to market your business, get traffic to your website and build your community. By following this simple list of etiquette tips you will make the most of this medium and be on the way to becoming a professional social networker!
