Networking for business is one of the most important strategies for building valuable relationships and making business connections that will stand the test of time. The connections that you make need to carry you and strategizing is essential for success.

The mystique of social networking

When it comes to networking for business, it seems as though there are generally two different schools of thought. People either love it or hate it. The people who love to network go along and are extremely successful at establishing new relationships and strengthening and maintaining already-existing relationships that they can take to the next level. On the other hand, people who hate to network (or, at the very least, consider it a painful chore), it is important for them to understand that there are several ways to approach networking and that many of those approaches are far less difficult (or painful) than they think. In fact, they may very well start to enjoy networking in spite of themselves.

The positive points of networking

Networking allows you to constantly expand your scope of valuable connections. The more valuable connections you have, the more relationships you will form with others and the more relationships you form, the better your chances of increasing your sales and becoming even more successful than you are presently. Social networking is dependent on successful relationships and there is no other way to gain the trust and credibility in the eyes of the other people without relating to each other on an emotional level as one human being to another. Networking should never be about going to a face-to-face meeting with a stack of business cards that you proceed to hand out and then just leave the meeting. Your right to hand out your business cards must be earned after you have established a connection with the other person. At that point, the other person needs to ask you for your card. You should be very careful about passing it to them too quickly. If you approach it without the emotional connection, that will most likely be the last conversation that you ever have with that person because you are not building a foundation to the relationship. Successful networking depends on a couple of simple principles:

• The ability to see things from the other person’s perspective.
  
• Using the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?) philosophy. In other words, your only concern in that situation is figuring out a way to solve the other person’s problems. It should never be about how wonderful you and your business are.

There a a few steps that you should take if you want your networking to truly pay off on an ongoing basis.

• The day after your networking event: You should examine your outlook calendar for the last several months and identify a handful of people with whom you have spent the most time. You need to ask yourself if those relationships really work for you and your business.
   
• The week after your networking event: You should connect two people from the event who don’t know each other yet (of course, that is if you feel that their knowing each other would be mutually beneficial). After you have done that, you should think of a business associate with whom you would like to connect and ask one (or both) of those people to make an introduction for you.
   
• The month after your networking event: Think about a connection that you have with another business associate that you feel is not as strong as you would like it to be and make a gesture (such as forwarding some valuable content to them, for example). That gesture will probably have the effect of strengthening the bond that you have with that person and you will both be on your way to sharing a valuable and sustaining relationship.

Conclusion

Networking is a critical part of your marketing strategy and it is important that you get into the habit of interacting with other people effectively. It is an incredibly powerful tool because it enables you to broaden your sphere of influence. Relationships are always at the heart of your success. The sooner you stop regarding networking as a chore and start to view it as an important (and even pleasant) part of your overall strategy that will be extremely instrumental in your business’s success, the sooner you will be able to enjoy your accomplishments. Now is the time to take the opportunities that are at your fingertips. Your possibilities are limitless.

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Pinterest is on  people’s lips nowadays. It’s the hottest social networking site to hit the Internet in a while. People with common interests get together through the online images that they select. It can be very effective for business also.

People can  create clusters of images that they can share with other people. The clusters are called pinboards and they can allow other people to have them as well, as long as those other people are Pinterest members. However, you must be warned that Pinterest is addictive!

There are many different reasons why Pinterest is so appealing. One of the reasons is that it is an aesthetic and wonderful escape from real life. The feeling that you will get (consistently) is that you will feel good. You can capture that concept and use it to market your brand with potentially overwhelming results. However, it is very important to remember that behind all of the buzz about Pinterest, it has the potential to be an extraordinarily effective marketing tool for your business. Pinterest is a great way to heighten brand awareness, generate discussions, and eventually, sell more products and services. There are several different approaches that you can take when it comes to using Pinterest as a marketing tool for your business.

The Pinterest members are at various skill and knowledge levels and it is important to customize your use of the tool to your skill level.

Pinterest beginners

If you are just beginning to use Pinterest, you should lay the groundwork for your marketing strategy in the following manner:

• Your profile: Make sure that you include your business’s name on your Pinterest profile. You can use your business’s name as your username or you can customize your profile name to include your business’s name after you have already established the profile.
   
• Describe your business: You should be sure to include some content on your profile that says who you are and what you stand for. You should express your interests in the “About” section. If you place it there, it will appear right underneath your photograph. That will make it very easy for other people to find you and your business.
   
• Link your Pinterest profile to other social media channels: You should link your account with your Facebook and Twitter accounts. In fact, when you are first accepted as a Pinterest member, you will be asked if you want to do that.
   
• Your website’s URL: It is very important that you add the URL of your website to your Pinterest profile.  It is another sure way that people will be able to connect with you.
   
• Continuing to work it: Once you have been accepted as a member and set up your profile, it is critical that you continue to spend time building your clusters so that other people can benefit from them. You should be consistent in your efforts (just as you are with using the other social media channels). It is more effective to work it steadily for your business than to do it infrequently in large quantities. As with any social networking site, you are building relationships with other people and consistency, credibility, and trustworthiness are all critical to your success when it comes to connecting with others.
   
• Go the distance: After you have pinned an image,  you should make sure to include a caption. It is very important that you make the effort to do more than just the minimum. After all, your objective is to promote discussions with other people and your captions will certainly help you to do that.
   
• Include other people: With Pinterest, you can include other people in your image clusters (in the form of contributors). The more people you engage, the more interesting and effective your use of Pinterest for business will be.
   
• Tell you story: It is essential for you to tell your story and the story of your business. People will be touched by your story on an emotional level and will act accordingly because you have stirred up their feelings. Emotion is at the heart of all meaningful relationships.
   
• Be sincere and genuine: Even though you will be using Pinterest for your business, you are still using it as a human being. It is very important for you to show people who you really are. They will appreciate it and they will know the difference if you don’t do that.
   
• Position yourself as a subject matter expert: One of your most important objectives is for you to be regarded as the subject matter expert. You want to be on the top of everyone’s mind when it comes to people needing your particular products and/or services. The way that you accomplish that is by continuing to prove that you have vast knowledge and expertise and that you are able to help them solve their problems.

Conclusion

Pinterest has gained tremendous popularity recently and seems to be stronger than ever at this point. It will only get stronger. It has many benefits that you can leverage for your business. The unique approach that is taken to bring people together seems to be extraordinarily effective and the combination of powerful images that touch people coupled with meaningful conversations is having an incredible effect on people wanting to connect. One of those is that it can increase your website traffic by a great deal. There are so many advantages that it will be well worth your time and effort to get involved with it. The stronger and more diverse your marketing strategy is, the more successful your business will ultimately be.

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Many people have been involved with social media for a while now. However, there are others who are just beginning to use it and to understand its amazing potential to help them achieve extreme success professionally and personally.

Of course, your perspective will be very different if you already have a lot of experience with social media than if you don’t have a lot of knowledge about what you can do with it and how much it can help you to become a raging success. If you are a person who got involved with social media a while ago, you can see that the social media of today and all of the tools and tricks that you can use for your business is much more sophisticated than it ever was before.

As a newcomer to social media, there are several basic principles that you should keep in mind and that will undoubtedly serve you very well along the road to business success through social media. Of course, you need to pick a beginning point and work from there.

Choose to follow exciting people: Everyone, especially when you are just starting out in a particular discipline, needs someone with more knowledge and experience, from whom they can learn. You need to identify a person who has knowledge in an area within social media and build a relationship with that person so that they can impart their knowledge to you. A wonderful and extremely effective way to begin to gain that knowledge is by asking questions. You should always keep in mind that you will return the favor (in some way) at some point in the future.

Be who you are: Social media interaction is a social activity. Other people are interested in who you are as a person and what you believe in a stand for. You should always be willing and able to jump into the discussions and be an important part of the interactions. You need to show other people who you truly are. You will see that positive results will come your way.

Show modesty: If you are a newcomer to social media, that means that you are trying to carve a place for yourself within the social media communities of your choosing. Even if you feel that you have a great deal of knowledge and expertise on a given topic, it is wise not to show it in the beginning. People may resent you if you do and before you can be at a comfortable place when it comes to sharing your knowledge, you need to establish relationships with people that have a solid foundation that won’t be damaged by ego.

Choose your niche: Before you begin any interactions with people on various social media channels, you need to choose the social media channels (and communities) that will serve you the most effectively. You need to make sure to have a social media strategy in place before you do anything else and part of that strategy means that you need to identify your target audience and your particular niche.

Stay on the good side of other people: Your first objective when it comes to social media interaction is to figure out how you can help other people. Always remember that your driving principle should be WIIFM (What’s In It for Me?). In other words, it can’t ever be about how wonderful and exciting you and your business are. It must always be about what you can do to solve the other person’s problems. If you can manage to do that, your relationships will prove to be invaluable.

Metrics are not the be all and end all: Admittedly, the numbers are extremely important when it comes to social media. However, they are not everything. If you have 5,000 followers and you only interact with 20 of them, what good is the number to you? It is better (and more sensible) to go for quality over quantity. Also, remember that your social media connections are not set in stone. If you find that certain individuals are not working out, it is perfectly appropriate for you to eliminate them and replace them with other people with whom you have a better and more productive connection. When it comes to your interactions, remember that you should always strive to offer the highest-quality content, which will give value to the other people.

Always be fair: If you share someone else’s content, make sure that you always give attribution to that person. That is what you would want other people to do and it is right and fair for you to do the same thing.

Follow others in the way they follow you: That is the right thing to do. Your relationships cannot be one sided or else they are not true relationships.

Interact for the appropriate amount of time: It is very easy to become addicted to social media interactions; however, it is important that you don’t give up your life for it. Having a life balance is healthy and it is necessary. It will also make your social media interactions more effective and more successful.

Conclusion

This is a very exciting time to be getting involved with social media. You need to make sure that you really understand the dynamics social media entails and work accordingly. You have the benefit of a great number of effective and exciting tools that were not available in the past and that will only help you to have a more successful and exciting business. You should take advantage of all that social media has to offer and continue to grow and learn along the way.

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You have been very consistent and regular about posting your content (and syndicating it to the appropriate people). Your articles are educational and useful. It is also important that your interactions have a large social element to them.

The main theme of your online postings is your branding and you want to communicate about your business offerings so that everyone understands how you can help them and how your products and/or services can enhance their experience. However, your approach online is extremely important and it is critical that you don’t forget the “social” in social media. Good, solid communication with your online connections is what it is all about. Social media interactions are never one-sided. The more you interact, the easier it will be to eventually reach your business goals.

Link to influencers, solid resources, videos, etc

Your posted content should not only be well-written and extremely useful to other people but it should also link to your resources and other information that will prove valuable to your readers. The fact that the links that you put into your content will lead people away from your business is not a bad thing. It demonstrates that you are not merely showing a narrow perspective but that you are offering a broader and more comprehensive and fair one.

Ask and answer questions

If your readers are kind and considerate enough to post comments and ask questions, you  have an obligation to interact with them. Not only is it polite behavior but it also humanized all of the people who are involved in the interactions. The content that will be generated from those interactions will absolutely be valuable to you and you can use it in future content. You can also draw ideas from the interactions. Good ideas come from so many different places.

Share content that deserves to be shared

If you read content that another person has posted that you think will be valuable to others, by all means share it. The content will be appreciated and the idea that you shared it will be considered favorably by others.

Get involved with discussions

You should regularly check out other people’s discussions so that you can get involved. Your perspective and expertise will be greatly appreciated and you will be strengthening your position in your online communities as a subject matter expert. Your ultimate goal is to get people to automatically think of you when they need help with something in your particular niche.

Make worthwhile contributions

With social media interactions, it can never be about the hard sell. You have many interesting and valuable things to say and people are just waiting for you to say them. It is important to make it interesting and exciting. Injecting some humor is always appealing and you can definitely get your point across while making it compelling at the same time. In fact, people will definitely remember you better if you use that approach. It is very important that you show your human side. People (all people) respond emotionally and it is important that you show them that you are human also.

Conclusions

As a business owner, of course you want to educate other people online about your offerings. At times, you may forget about the social aspect of social media. It is important to always keep that in your sight. Engaging other people online allows you to build your relationship with them and the more you engage them, the more they will want to interact with you. You and your online connections will be better and wiser for having connected on a very real level and establishing a relationship that will live for a very long time. The social aspect of social media is exactly what enables you to cultivate relationships with people that will eventually allow you to do business and increase revenue.

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When you first establish your web presence for your business, it may seem like you are totally alone. Until you start interacting with other people, you may feel isolated. Your social media activities don’t only involve you.

Even though you may have a feeling of isolation, that couldn’t be further from the truth. When you first establish your web presence, nobody has any idea that you are there. That is where social media comes into play in a big way. What you need to do is write content on topics in your niche or industry and post and syndicate the content to all of the appropriate and relevant groups that you can think of.

Building trust and credibility

When you are first establishing your presence, you are building your reputation and you are working toward the goal of getting people to find you trustworthy and credible. Of course, it is very important that the quality of your content is high and that what you are sharing with other people is compelling and exciting. Another important thing to consider is the frequency and consistency of your postings. If you post at least once or twice a week, people will start to notice and will be consistent in reading content with your name on it. Beyond merely reading your content, people will also begin to make comments and ask questions based on what  you are sharing. You will start to have stimulating and valuable conversations and the more discussions you have with people, the more interactions will be generated. As a business person with a new web presence, there are several different things that you can do to help you to establish relationships with other people online.

• Using links: It is clear that you can’t remain in isolation as a business owner for any length of time. You obviously need other people to help you to prosper. You need to interact with other people and you need to be given the opportunity to show them what you can do and what you can offer them. You need to be as proactive as possible in establishing the relationships that will help your business and in working on really building those relationships once they are established. The links that you use are your connection with other people. They are the bridges between isolation and civilization. The links that you use will help get you and your business noticed. The more noticed you are, the higher your potential rankings on the search engines will be.
   
• Patience and persistence: You need to work hard at establishing a good reputation. Once you do, people will be eager to connect with you and to interact and will continue to be  hungry for what you have to offer them. It is important to remember that it takes time to establish solid relationships (online and in person). It won’t happen overnight but it will happen if you keep at it and you are consistent in your efforts. Three to six months is certainly not an unusual amount of time when it comes to seeing your social media efforts starting to pay off.
   
• Embracing connections through social media: When it comes to human beings and social media, social media actually enables people to connect with people with whom they would not connect in person. Many people have relationships with others that they don’t really work on. They don’t pick up the telephone to call those people and they don’t make appointments to meet those people. They have, essentially, broken the connection. Social media, on the other hand, can help people to reconnect with other people because it requires very little effort. They can connect through Twitter, for example, and it will take no more than a few seconds (remember that Twitter has a 140-character maximum per Tweet). The social media channels enable people to easily connect with other people and before they know it, their relationships are getting back to what they once were.

Conclusion

Contrary to what some people think, social media helps to eliminate isolation. If people have relationships with others that are not strong and are really of no benefit to either side, it has absolutely nothing to do with social media. It has everything to do with the fact that the human beings are the ones who are choosing the relationships to be what they are.  It is very easy to connect with people through social media and to foster positive and productive relationships that are mutually beneficial. It doesn’t take a long time to type a message and everybody can spare a few seconds to reach out to another person. The small effort and investment of time is well worth it because you get so much more in return.

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Being a part of social media and interacting online on a regular and consistent basis is critical to the success of your business. However, it is important to build your online communities so that you get the most benefit.

Many people recognize the importance of effective online communities; however, many more people don’t truly get how important having the appropriate people as part of your online communities is for your professional success. Online communities and the interactions that occur among people are, even at this point in time, often viewed in a nebulous or mysterious manner. People are very often not willing to embrace what they don’t understand.

One important thing to remember when it comes to building online communities successfully is that the community should never rely on just one person for its leadership and direction. A good way to figure out if there is too much dependency on one person is by paying attention to the total number of postings for that community. If it seems like a large percentage of them were made by one person, it is time to distribute the wealth a little more evenly. It is important for someone to take the reins when the community is first being established; however, there should be some balance established. It is acceptable (and understandable) in the beginning for more postings to be made by that one individual. However, as time goes by, other people should step up and contribute.

How to get started

When you are first establishing an online community, there are several things that you need to put in place right from the start.

• Identify your goals and objectives: You will have a much easier time accomplishing what you want to accomplish if you identify it first. You need to make sure that you have the tools to accomplish your goals and you also need to figure out your target market. Once you have figured out who the members of your target audience are, you need to figure out what is important to them, who the heavy hitters within the niche are, the specific types of technology they use,  and what motivates them.
   
• Strategic positioning: Online communities are successful because people are willing to actively engage. The online community will not be successful it it isn’t centrally located within your social media strategy. It is important that you make the information that you want to impart to the other people in your communities available only through your online communities. If you make it easy for your online connections to find the information in other ways, your online community connection will not hold the same value. It is important that you position your community in such as way that your audience has to recognize the value of the information and is willing to make some effort in order to obtain that information.
   
• Your reason for being: It is critical that your communities have a clear and important reason for being in existence. You need to give the other people in your communities a real reason to engage with the other members (including you) in the various communities.
   
• Technology is not the entire answer: Using the correct (and most effective) tools is only half of why y our online community will be a success. The other half of it is your strategy and management of the communities themselves. Your investment is time and consistency. Not money.

Conclusion

Online communities are critical to the success of your business and it is extremely important for you to understand not only the importance that they hold for your business but also for you to be at the center of that part of your online strategy. Your social media marketing strategy must be well thought out and successfully executed so that your online interactions are mutually beneficial and they result in solid, profitable relationships.

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Contrary to what you might think, it is not difficult to manage social media for business effectively. If you can commit to 20 to 30 minutes a day, you will be golden. It doesn’t take more than that for success.

As a business owner, there are many things that you need to accomplish throughout your workday. If you are efficient and mindful of not wasting time on the majority of your business activities, you will be able to accomplish everything that you need to in a given day. Of course, there will be days when you are not as productive as other days. On the whole, however, you should be able to accomplish a great deal. It is very important to try not to get distracted by other things, if possible.

Be organized

If you are going to successfully manage your social media activities, it is critical that you are as organized as possible. If you commit to being disciplined and as organized as is humanly possible, you will begin to see that a rhythm will develop. Once you get into a routine that you can count on (and one that really works), it will become less of a chore and you won’t even notice the effort that you are making.

There are several ways in which you can start to get organized.

Identify your key social media areas

You need to review the social media channels with which you connected over the past year and identify a handful that worked the most effectively for your business. It may be a bit of a challenge because social media makes so much information easily available to you. If you choose more than 4 or 5 channels, you may find that you are overwhelmed. It is better to choose fewer channels and be accurate than to choose more and not have the ability to really pinpoint the information and turn it into something that you can use for your business. Once you have been able to identify those channels, you can focus on working them and getting the most out of them for the benefit of your business that you can. They will serve you well.

Prioritize your activities

As you are arranging your schedule for the day, you should think about the most effective time to work with your social media channels so that they yield the most positive results for your business. A “to do” list is an excellent organization tool and until you really get into the swing of managing your social media interactions, you may want to rely on that. At the end of the day, you want to be left with the feeling that you have been successful with your social media activities. It is important to set realistic goals for your business when it comes to social media. If your goals are too ambitious, you may not be able to accomplish them and you will then be in a position of potentially not accomplishing what you set out to do. There are many possible approaches that you can choose when it comes to social media. One is to make a commitment to 20 minutes a day. Another is to interacting for 1 minute every hour that you are working (which may be a little more cumbersome if you aren’t used to it). Using an alarm will help you if that is the approach that you decide to take. Remember that relationships are at the heart of social media success so you need to factor that into your social media time. Once you have established relationships, you need to work on cultivating them and allowing them to grow.

Don’t be afraid to eliminate what isn’t working

If you find that one or more of  your social media efforts aren’t working, there is no shame in abandoning it (or them) and replacing the channel(s) with ones that you feel will work more effectively.

Conclusion

As time goes on and technology progresses, it is critical that you stay current with what is available and with what works for your business. What works today may not work tomorrow. You must always keep in mind that consistency and frequency are two elements that will be instrumental in your business’s success. You will be wise if you educate yourself as much as possible about the tools that are available to help you to achieve that success. It is essential that you keep an open mind and that you recognize that the potential is there for your business to be a raging success because of social media.

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The success of social media is completely dependent on relationships. Relationships flourish because humans converse with each other on an ongoing and consistent basis. Without conversations, social media would not exist. Everyone must converse to make social media work.

It really doesn’t matter who you are or how popular or famous you are. Social media works exactly the same for all people across the universe. If social media is going to work for you, you must commit to being consistent and reliable with your conversations that you have with other people online. You may be a person who can handle conversing with numerous people at once or you may be more comfortable with conversing on a regular basis with a smaller number of people. The most important thing is that you are committed to conversing on a regular and consistent basis so that you can build relationships with your online connections that will last a very long time and that are of mutual benefit.

Not bad, just different

Contrary to what some people think, conversing through social media has not detracted from face-to-face conversations. It has simply take on a different form. The conversations that take place through social media are often quick and to the point. Many people prefer that to taking a long time to get to the point. It is definitely valuable to learn how to converse in different ways. That is part of what keeps the relationship interesting and fulfilling. It is a misconception that if you converse through social media, you are not able to have a deep, personal relationship with another person. You most certainly can have a relationship that is just as valuable. Eventually (in most cases), you will start to converse with other people with whom you share an online relationship in person. At that point, your relationship will have blossomed to the next level.

Blogging as a form of conversation

Blogging can be legitimately viewed as another form of conversation. You write a blog article and share it with people in your social media communities. Your followers read your article and start to discuss some aspect of the article. The definition of conversation is a “combination of interaction, spontaneity that follows the rules of etiquette.” If you read blog articles that other people write and you react to those articles in writing, you are having a conversation of sorts (although, perhaps not in the traditional sense). In fact, you may find that people will be much more inclined to converse with you than they would if you were interacting with them in person. Many people are bolder when they converse in writing because it isn’t quite as frightening or as risky.

Using various social media channels to converse

The popularity and “user-friendliness” of social media makes is very easy for people to converse and for many people to have relationships in general. For example, Facebook and Twitter make it especially easy for people to have interesting and valuable conversations. With Twitter (because of its 140-character maximum per tweet), you converse about all sorts of interesting things in short spurts. With the limited amount of time that people nowadays seem to have for having conversations, it is perfect. Facebook is another excellent social media tool that makes it very easy to have online conversations that are valuable and compelling.

Conclusion

Social media is definitely here to stay. If you recognize it as part of your everyday business (and personal) life and you figure ways that you can integrate it appropriately when it comes to relating to other people and conversing with them on a regular and consistent basis, you will be opening yourself and your business up to a whole new aspect of communication and conversation and you will be more successful for it.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let's have coffee.

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Social media websites are a phenomenon today. Websites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Orkut, YouTube and Blogger are some of the most accessed websites on the Internet. It, therefore, becomes important to leverage the widespread popularity of these websites and develop top social media strategies to expand your business.

The following are top social media strategies that can be considered:

• Objective – The objective of your social media campaign must be pretty clear right from the start. Branding, consumer awareness, reputation management, lead generation, sales, marketing, etc, are all activities very much achievable using Social Media Optimization (SMO); however, they require separate initiatives.
   
• Picking the right battles – There is no dearth of social media platforms available out there to begin your campaigns. Picking the right battle ie, selecting the websites, will hold the key to your success. You cannot be all over the Internet because constant engagements on every such forum would require a mammoth effort.
   
• Meaningful connects – Try spamming and the results will not be encouraging at all. In order to make the most out of your social media initiatives, consumers will have to relate to your business in some way or the other. Work toward building long lasting relationships with people in your network and the results will be rewarding in the long run.
   
• Web 2.0 – The term was first coined in the year 1999 by a consultant of information architecture. Today, it goes beyond the realm of only aesthetics and graphic design. Rich web 2.0 features, if included in your social media campaigns, will facilitate active information sharing and collaboration.
   
• Human analytics – There is a wide variety of tools available today to support and track social media initiatives. Their utility cannot be undermined. However, no tool will be able to analyze the emotional relationship between the brand and the consumer. Human intervention is required to correctly analyze trends, data and defining key strategies.
   
• Blogging – Start blogging about your business and create a genuine footfall of people wanting to seek information about your industry. Keep it information-driven and subtly introduce commercial elements to it such as customized signatures leading to your principal website (Calls-to-Action) at the end of every post.
   
• Trend Capture –Website analytics are often the most ignored aspect of a social media strategy. The amount of effort that you put in on various social media platforms can easily be analyzed using tools such as Google Analytics that provide statistics on website traffic.
   
• Encouraging Participation – Overdoing information dissemination can backfire and may not yield the desired results. The interaction has to be a 2-way process and you must encourage strong and sustained participation from your target audience to drive forward your objectives in an organic manner.
   
• Leveraging Full Features – Vertically extending the Facebook profile photograph of your business page to its maximum permissible size of 200 x 600 pix, customizing the twitter image background and actively participating in question/answers on LinkedIn.com are some of the most underutilized yet effective ways to catch the eye of your target audience.

Conclusion

Incorporating top social media strategies in your scheme of things has become a must, especially if you are responsible for the growth of a business. This is one of the most cost-effective ways to achieve a wide variety of business objectives and a must try. You must be extremely cautious with the way that you delegate this critical aspect to a third party. Doing due diligence about the strength of the company in executing social media strategies can go a long way to ensuring profitability for your business.

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1. Social Networking Connections – to Accept or Not, That Is the Question
2. LinkedIn Connections – Quality vs Quantity
3. Accepting the Right LinkedIn Connections

When it comes to social media, quality versus quantity must be considered. This certainly applies to LinkedIn as well. Considering that you use LinkedIn for business, you want to ensure that the quality of your connections is above reproach.

In all likelihood, you receive many requests from LinkedIn users who want to connect with you. If you have a strong online presence, people are aware of you and your business and want to jump on your professional “bandwagon.” Sometimes, people have a really justifiable reason for wanting to connect with you on LinkedIn and sometimes they want to connect with you simply because they are gathering as many connections as they can so that they can say they have a certain number of LinkedIn connections. You should think long and hard before you accept invitations to connect. At the very least, you should make calculated, informed, well-thought-out decisions so that the relationships that you share through LinkedIn are mutually beneficial and strong. There are some simple rules that you may want to consider following before you decide on accepting any particular individual:

Knowing the person

If you have a casual online relationship with an individual who invites you to connect with him or her online, it may not be enough for you to make the decision to accept the invitation. There certainly will be times when it is not possible for you to establish an in-person relationship with someone because you have certain limitations (such as geographic limitations). However, with that said, it doesn’t mean that you don’t need to cultivate the relationship to the point where you consider them trustworthy, credible, and a subject matter expert in there are of expertise.

Having a desire to share a relationship with the person

If you are at the beginning of a relationship with someone with whom you share professional interests and you feel that  you would like to get to know the person on a deeper level, you should accept their LinkedIn invitation (or extend an invitation to them). LinkedIn is a wonderful way to deepen a professional relationship. If you feel that you have a great deal in common and would like to be in a situation where you can both benefit from each other, go for it.

Having a mutually supportive relationship

If  you have a relationship with someone who you are confident believes in what you are doing professionally and you, in turn, believe in what they are doing to the same extent, you should definitely connect with them on LinkedIn. You should have certain definitive goals in that relationship. As you connect on a professional level, there will be a time in the near future when you will want to exchange professional recommendations based on your respective work. The recommendation that you exchange will carry a great deal of weight.

Interacting in person

Once you have finally met the person face to face, the next thing that you will want to do is to learn more about them (not directly from what they tell you about themselves). You will want to investigate their credentials, background, testimonials, etc. It is very important for you to learn information about them so that you can get an objective idea about who they are and how they do business. Once you have learned about them, you can decide whether you want to have them as a connection online. If, after learning about them on a deeper level, you don’t have a strong sense of synergy between you, you may very well decide that you don’t want them as one of your LinkedIn connections.

Conclusion

High-quality LinkedIn connections are critical to the success of your business. Being able to say that you have a very large number of connections with whom you really don’t share much (or anything at all) really won’t get you very far. After the initial reaction of the other person feeling impressed by that fact, they will see that large numbers of useless connections don’t do much more than take up space. You want to make sure that the people with whom you share LinkedIn connections are of benefit to you and your business as much as you are of benefit to them and their business. Another thing that you should be aware of is that if you open yourself up to connections that you have considered carefully enough, you may be making you and yourself vulnerable to spammers. If the connections are not what they should be as far as the quality is concerned, you run the risk of their saying or doing something that might ultimately hurt your and your business.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let's have coffee.

You might also like:

1. LinkedIn Connections – Quality vs Quantity
2. Cultivating Meaningful LinkedIn Connections
3. Your Online Business Connections — Quality vs Quantity