30 December 2008

Five Items To Do For Success At Social Networking Sites

This is a post by my friend Ken Kinstle. It is excellent

Five Items To Do For Success At Social Networking Sites

by mrken777 on Dec.08, 2008, under Business, Success

Number One- Always greet your new followers! Depending on how many people start to follow you, that will determine whether you do it manually or use a program like Tweetlater to welcome new followers. Tweetlater is nice because as soon as they follow you a message goes out introducing yourself and thanking them. Resist the urge to post a link in this thank you message! How would it be when someone shook your hand for the first time they then tried to sell you something in the next sentence! A lot of people do post a link or a give away or anything, but I say be friendly, say hello let them come to you. This is far more effective than blasting a new person before they have heard a word that you have said…

Number Two- Be sure to post valuable information, interesting articles, photos, video links, music links. Give something of value to keep people interested. Insert links, affiliate links, the things that you sell sparingly or what the community will absorb. Keep them wondering what you will come up with. Google news reader is what I use mainly for this. Set it up to receive different RSS feeds from news, blogs or what ever might be interesting and apply to their lives. Its not always about what we like, I am the worst at this! My followers do hear a lot of motorcycle related stuff, I try not to over do it. Give them something of value for listening to your posts.

Number Three- Keep the personal stuff to a minimum, there needs to be some real life stuff that relates to your readers and prove you are not a post generating robot. My goodness not many want to know that much, I stubbed my toe, oh I put salt on my eggs, Come on.. Use discretion, be personal, and share when asked but don’t blog every breath the new puppy takes. I think you get this!

Number Four- Double check your posts for spelling, grammar, accuracy and by all means make sure the link works! You don’t have to be a scholar, or have perfect English grammar. I know mine is really rough! Do your best though, what you say and how you say it is all people have to judge you by. Not many successful first grader marketers out there. What I am saying is be a professional, if you want people to take you seriously! Double check the link after you have posted it! I am telling you, we all have posted bad ones and it looks very slip shod. Who wants to hook up and buy something from a third rate marketer. OK enough on that, one of my pet peeves.

Number Five- In this list anyway, answer your messages as quickly as you are able. Strike while the iron is hot! I do not mean just answer those that look like customers. Some of the people I spend the most time on messaging and the phone never really make a bunch of sales. People just want to be heard, answer your phone calls, messages and your messages posted as soon as possible. Do not try to evaluate the person asking right away, or wait if you can reply. To be a professional we must answer all reasonable questions and be polite.

Treat people with respect. Treat them like you want to be treated and enjoy great success in your social networking adventures.

Just wish I was riding,

You can link to Ken's blog by clicking here, and you should. He offers a lot of great information for home business owners.

Twitter Guilt

I have to confess two things:

1. I have made it a point since beginning with Twitter to always send a personal thank you to ever single person who follows me. I have also looked at every profile so I could say something unique to that person in my thank you. Lastly, I have consciously make a choice as to who I follow back based on bio's, pictures, content, etc...I am not a big believer in auto-following. In fact, we just had a discussion going about his tonight on Twitter. So here is confession number one.

I got behind. REALLY, REALLY behind. I had over 150 new emails in my inbox telling me about new followers. Every day I would say "tomorrow". Tomorrow I will thank each one and look at each profile. Every day it was more overwhelming. So today I went against my own system. I set up an auto-thank you and and auto-follow and that is what I used for the last week's worth of new followers. I'm sorry if you were one of them. Please do not take it personally. I figure that an auto-thanks is way better than no thanks at all, and that's where things were heading.

I really do feel guilty. Is there a support group for Twitter-guilt? If you are someone who followed me in the week between Christmas and New Years, please understand. I will look for your tweets and take extra time to respond personally over the next few days. Thank you.

2. This is a good one for guilt. Twitter is fun. It is more fun than anything else I do online. My husband asked me tonight if it's good business or just good fun. So here is the amazing part. In the short time I've been tweeting on twitter (about 6 weeks), I've developed more business contacts than in 6 months using other forms of social media. So guilt...more fun, more business. I once heard that work was supposed to be hard. LOL!!

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