Have you ever thought about using Social Media for your business networking advantage? If the answer is “No”, you should think again because it is a great tool to connect with key people and bring attention to what you do. Disclaimer: by Social Media here I don’t mean specific platforms like LinkedIn and 100AM . Here I am talking about Social Media we are typically using for leisure.
As a matter of fact, those portals are created with the sole purposes of helping you to create a social network with people you have something in common with.
Facebook’s business page is equipped with an array of useful tools that can help you connect with potential clients, partners or suppliers. For example, Facebook Audience Insights that helps you track the audience by demographics, pages likes, location, interests, etc. This will work great if you are trying to do a competitor’s research. Watch what content resonates better with the audience and model the behavior. Don’t steal anything – it will be way obvious. Know what works and figure out how to apply it to your product or service to attract more people.
This is all about the keywords and your ability to analyze them. Twitter Advanced Search helps you do just that. By having a clear understanding of the person, you are trying to reach and what type of words will they use in their bios, tweets and for hashtags. One word will pull worldwide conversations and now your task is to single out most active people in each niche. You can then repost their content and share the content that will click with them. You can interact with them and when the moment is right, they will think they already know you.
Instagram is a platform to share visual content. It can be as easy or complex as you want. It is a great opportunity to project company images and sales pitches to worldwide audience. All your posts are essentially targeting local audience. If you need to reach people in the other countries you may need to look into using one of the VPNs services.
Hashtags are the key here! By using the right hashtags, you can find virtually anyone in any niche. But not all of them work as well as others. Use tools like Hashtagify. It will show you the top 10 significant keywords/hashtags in your industry. Narrow your search down to 3-5 relevant ones and look at their popularity. You are not looking for popular hashtags as it may seem at the beginning. Rather, you need active and not crowded ones to help you get your post on the top. The popularity of the hashtags you use also depends on the number of your followers.
The danger of social media business networking conducted through these portals lies in the idea that people are not always ready to discuss business. Unlike LinkedIn that was built specifically around business relations, Facebook and other sites are mainly built for pleasure. So, all the hard work you did may not pay off at the end. However, now more and more people are conducting business and marketing themselves using social media so this issue is fading rapidly, however you should be careful and not pushy when you are looking to connect with someone for the business purpose.
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