Posted by Last week I spent some time talking to a local small business who had taken the plunge into social media, but hadn’t had a lot of engagement, yet. When doing a little research on their clients, I found that they had many relationships with other companies that also had a social media presence, but they hadn’t taken that relationship online. There was an added value that they could have been providing to their clients, collaborators and vendors that they left on the table because they had not connected online. In addition, they were missing out on whole networks of potential new clients as a result.
Let’s not forget that people were networking for a LONG time before that networking went “online”. It used to be that when conversing with someone for the first time, we would find out what they did, what interests they had, and where they were from then go down the list of people we knew with those same characteristics to see what contacts we had in common. Because of the magic of social networking, we get to skip this step because we are told that we have this many friends in common and can see who they are with the click of a link. The same is true for businesses that have a social media presence–just by looking at the facebook page or the follower list on twitter we can see what other business they are connected with. Those relationships can be highlighted in tweets. status updates, pictures, etc. You can bring value to the relationship by introducing the other business to your connections and as a byproduct you are introduced to their connections.
A couple examples of how you can easily make these connections:
- If you have pictures of a product you developed on your facebook page for a client make sure to tag that business and link back to their facebook page.
- When you have a meeting scheduled with a client, use their twitter handle and tweet about how excited you are for the meeting before and the great results of the meeting afterwards.
What are some other examples that you can suggest? Please share in the comments.
call me koko 
Pictures entice users EVEN MORE, so when tweeting or fb’ing…. post a picture if possible and that engages others and brings it to another level… IMO. I’m no social media pro but I know how I function on the web and what myself and my friends like.
I wish my job would allow us to set up a twitter and facebook page for our sales team but they have their reasoning behind it and I respect that. So many people don’t use social media correctly, so it can take a turn for the worse, but it can be great as well!
Thanks for the reminder–I do love to see a picture 🙂