The Social Networking Map To Success

Social Networking has been around for years now, and many business owners are unsure about how to properly utilize websites like Twitter & Facebook to increase their sales and the presence of their brand.

Without going too much in detail, I will give you my opinion on how to start a successful social networking campaign.

1) Obviously, the first thing you must do is get your accounts. Twitter and Facebook are both free. I encourage you to sign up while there are still good names available, especially for Twitter. Like me for instance, the name of my Printing Company is “Paws Printing”. I was lucky enough to get that name for Twitter, so now my twitter Page is www.twitter.com/pawsprinting.

2) If you’ve never used social networking, now is the time to learn. It takes time to get people to follow you so now is your chance to make some test tweets and Facebook Updates (you can always delete your updates).

3) Twitter only allows 140 total characters for each tweet. If you are trying to direct your followers to a deep page or blogpost on your website the url of the page alone can take up too much of your allowed characters. Also note that spaces count as a character.

To further explain I will show you in detail how to shorten a long url:

• As an example, I will use a blog post I wrote last week. Here is the url for that post: http://www.lakeland-printing.com/blog/matt-cutts-confirms-footer-backlinks-do-not-hold-weight-like-article-links.html. This url takes up 118 characters, so now I only have 22 characters left to “explain” my tweet. The answer is simple, use a URL Shortener. I simply go to http://bit.ly/ (This service is free, and no sign-up is required – It even keeps stats on your click throughs).

4) Facebook is a bit easier. Simply copy and paste the link you would like to send your Facebook Followers to. In this example I will include a link for a used car that is available at Napleton Dodge in Kissimme Florida:

5) Find friends and followers can be the toughest part. If you want to find Twitter users in your town, a good start simply going to Google. I live In Lakeland Florida, so I would prefer local followers. I simply go to Google and search for twitter + “lakeland, fl”. I scroll down to the bottom and find this site: http://twitterholic.com/top100/followers/bylocation/Lakeland,+FL/.

I’m not sure how often that information is updated, but it will show me the top tweeters in Lakeland Florida. Simply follow these people after reading their profiles. You don’t want to follow porn people and get rich quick people. Remember, Twitter users can easily see who you are following. Now that you have this list of local Twitter users, see who they are following and who is following them. Start following them. I read a recent study recently where about 30% of the people you follow will follow you back.

6) Finding friends on Facebook can be a bit more challenging. You really have to do some searching on Facebook to find friends. I play a popular online game called “Mafia Wars” that netted me over 197 friends. Out of that number, about 20% of the people are local. I’ve made some great connections from them.

Now the most important point. Don’t tweet or update unless you have something to say. Even if you have to go a few days without updates, that will be fine. If you start telling your followers what you had for lunch every day then you will have no followers. They will quickly “unfollow” you.

Lorrie Walker runs a public relations firm in the Tampa – Lakeland Florida area. The other day she wrote a great post about social networking. I recommend you read her article here. My favorite quote of that article was:

“If Generation Y isn’t already part of your client base, they soon will be,” Walker said. “So businesses need to communicate on their level.”….Lorrie Walker