Liking, Tweeting, Re-tweeting and more...

If you are like me, and just plain busy, then you may not have embraced social networking yet. Social networking is quite helpful for building your profile online, which will in turn help your site appear high in Google results when people search on words related to your area of expertise, so it could be well worth taking the time to set up your social networking and then get involved in some socialisation around your business.

I put my toe in the water with social networking several years ago, setting up a Twitter and Facebook account, and also having a go at Second Life (anyone remember that?). At the time not that much was happening in social networking in the business arena, and I never really got back to it until this year.

To help you understand how it all works, I'm going to describe what steps I have taken, and then provide some examples of tools that are available to make it quicker and easier to get your message out via the many different social networking tools that are now in common use.

How I started using Social Networking

As I mentioned, I had set up my Facebook and Twitter accounts several years ago. Originally my Facebook account was a personal one; at the start of this year I setup an eNudge Facebook page to allow eNudge subscribers to easily see upcoming events related to eNudge and also make suggestions for additional functionality and more broadly discuss email and SMS marketing. You can access the eNudge Facebook page here.

My Contact Point Twitter account I admit I have barely used, however, I do regularly write blog posts for Women's Network Australia, and they make it very easy to Tweet your post into your Twitter account, which re-invigorated my use of Twitter.

Blogging, and then disseminating your content via Twitter and Facebook, means that many more people are likely to see the blog post, and tweet it (that is, send it to their Facebook Followers) or share it on with others via Facebook. This is especially the case in retail and in organisations that have a very large customer base, but as I mentioned above, it is also great for B2B in improving your rank in the search engines.

I've also had a LinkedIn account for many years, and really don't use that very much either. But I have noticed that more and more business people are creating a profile in LinkedIn and I have heard many more stories recently of colleagues re-connecting because they found each other on LinkedIn. People often use LinkedIn to check out who a person is, and what they have been up to in the past, to help validate whether they are the right person to work with. If you are in the corporate environment, I recommend that you create and maintain your LinkedIn profile.

Once you have set up your social networking accounts, it's important to promote them, just like you need to promote your website or your blog. Again, I haven't done that very much until recently, and expectedly I've had little benefit from the tools. So, below I am going to describe the tools that can make it easier to promote your online social networking so that you get the most out of it in the most efficent way.

But first, for those you don't yet have a Twitter / Facebook account here are the links to get started:
Create a Facebook page for your business. Ultimately, you will need to have a Facebook profile as well to get access to all the Facebook features.
Create a Twitter account.

Tools to Make it Easier

Building your presence in Facebook and Twitter can be helped by:

Making it easy for people to 'Like' your site in their Facebook account. Facebook shows you how to create the code to add a 'Like' this website button to your page here. If your website has a footer, adding the Like link to the footer will mean that people can like any page of your website very easily.
You should also make it easy for your website visitors to find your Facebook Business / Fan page, so that they can interact with you and the rest of the online community about your organisation. We've made it easy by:
1. securing the URL: www.facebook.com/eNudge by getting more than 25 people to like the page, and then applying to change the URL from the ugly very long set of numbers to our name. Of course, you have to be first to get to the name, so the sooner you setup your business Facebook page, and start getting people to like you, the better! Here's the instructions on how to change your Facebook name.
2. providing a link to the eNudge Facebook page at the bottom of our emails, home page, contact page of the eNudge website. You might also want to link to your Facebook page from your blog, if you have one.
To make it easy for website visitors to promote your website to their Twitter followers, you can add a Tweet button to your website. Twitter shows you how to add a tweet button to a web page here, and includes the ability to recommend that a person follows you on Twitter as well.
To encourage Twitter users to tweet your blog posts out to their followers, depending on the blog software you are using, there should be a option available to configure an automatic 'tweet this' link to each blog post. For our clients using Word Press, we have utilised readily available Twitter plug ins such as Tweet This.
Adding a 'Twitter Widget' to your website or blog shows your visitors the most recent tweets you have made to your followers, again encouraging people to follow you and adding more linkages between your content which can only be good for your Google rank. This page of Twitter provides links to widgets for both Facebook and your Website.
If you use both Twitter and Facebook, you can link the two together so that any Facebook entry can be easily shortened and then Tweeted out to your followers via your Twitter account. Twitter helps you to do that through their Connections page.
Connect your LinkedIn account to your blog so that whenever you write a blog post, it will be listed on your LinkedIn profile, and the updates to your connections for that week will include a link to your new blog post. Click here for instructions on how to do automatically update LinkedIn. Similarly, you can connect your LinkedIn account to your Twitter account, so that anything you put on LinkedIn gets tweeted: instructions here.

Getting the Most Benefit from your Social Networking

Because social networkig, particularly in the business arena, is still in its infancy, how to get the most benefit from your social networking will continue to evolve. However, as mentioed above, the key benefit of social networking that I am interested in achieving is an improved Google rank through building inbound links to Contact Point and eNudge websites.

The other key benefit of social networking is of course reaching new people online, because people who already know and like / tweet about you can expose you to all the people that follow / like them.

So, to get the most benefit from your social networking, once you have set up your accounts and linkages described above, then expanding on your social networking presence should just be a matter of:

Regularly adding on-topic posts to your blog or additional articles / content to your website pages.
Using the Facebook tools to promote events and other news e.g. with eNudge, we have found it very useful to promote the Webinars that we are running for eNudge subscribers using the event tool, and we add details of newly added eNudge functionality to a Facebook discussion for this.
Tweeting, Retweeting (i.e. tweeting another person's tweet to your followers), and sharing on-topic pages and posts from other people's websites that relate to your business and provide value to your network.
Ask for input from your network with regard to products / features / events - this is great to do via your Facebook discussions or through LinkedIn.
In your email newsletters, link to your blog posts so that your contacts can interact with you via your blog, and potentially 'like' and 'tweet' on your posts.

It's evolving, so we'd love to hear of your experiences, and what works for you!