Social Media; Are You Using It Right?
Social Media as a valuable business tool?
Social media is the hot new way to generate money for your business. However, if you aren't using it properly, you'll never see those dollars mount in your account. How are you using this incredible, wealth-
building tool? Have you been spending all your free time making sure you get messages posted on your Facebook, Twitter, and all the other myriad of networks to which you belong? If you have discovered Tweet Deck and are using it, congratulations. You save yourself countless hours. However, what sort of messages are you sharing?
If you are posting personal things like, "I made spaghetti sauce from scratch for dinner," "I feel totally out of it today," or "My child made honor roll," then you are wasting your time, just making friends, not money. It's high time you separated your business from your personal. Go now and set up a business profile. Then, use it as it was intended; for business!
As you begin sharing on your new profile, you need to follow one simple rule; share, don't sell! I don't mean to say you should never let your network know if you have a service or product that fills a need, just keep it to a 70/30 ratio, or less. Offer tips, articles, resources and the like and you will build a much more valuable following. Moreover, which would you prefer-a network of millions of friends or a few hundred interested prospects and clients?
Another plan you might consider is to find another business minded poster and cross promote each other. People tend to respond better when they hear someone other than yourself singing your praises.
Think about it. When you find something that is really terrific, not only do you want to tell others, but when you do, if it is something they are looking for, they listen. Wouldn't you?
So, stop wasting your time trying to use social media to make money by posting personal messages. Make your communications something noteworthy-something others would want to re-tweet. Build a loyal business following, even if it's a smaller group, and watch your efforts pay off.
© Copyright 2010 Ginger Marks
Ginger Marks is the founder of the DocUmeant Family of Companies, We Make YOU Look GOOD! For more information, visit http://www.documeantdesigns.com/. Her 2010 annual edition of Holiday Marketing Guide, Your business-marketing calendar of ideas is now available at http://www.HolidayMarketingGuide.com.