How To Increase Your Business by Building Your Network: Go Social

It’s pretty clear to everyone that business is made by people and one of the main aspects that everyone must take care of is the quality of the relationship you are capable of building with other people.

I’m not referring to the relationship between you and people you already know, but with others you still don’t know who, tomorrow, can potentially be important for you.

The point is that human beings share lots of interests, passions, hobbies and so on and those are very often the key to start a relation/discussion with others, something with can potentially turn into friendship or, at least, increase the respect for each other.

All that being said, in the last couple of years lots of new “social services” came out and many of them can definitely help you to run into new people and build a relationship that, tomorrow, can be helpful for your business.

Twitter

In the last couple of months my usage of Twitter has increased a lot. I noticed that keeping an eye to what happens in you “friends”‘ timeline increases the probability of coming across many news that can be worth a lot for me and that I was missing, joining conversations that could be the starting point for a business opportunity or, last but not least, offers me the ability to share something worthy for my followers, increasing  and improving my credibility and my trustfulness.

In particular, the last point is important to make your followers retweet your messages. Retweeting is like quoting, that means if what you share is worth a look, people are willing to tell their followers that they should have a look at what your are saying/sharing, hopefully making them follow you and growing your potential audience. I noticed that if you explicitly ask for a retweet, twitterers are more willing to do it (it works!).

Another important point to highlight is that sometimes you get in touch with people who have in common with you the same interests or hobbies and who could be potentially important for your business, but you are not aware of that yet. Can’t count the times I realized that people talking with me about photography or other subjects I care about on Twitter became important for my business, both as potential points of contact to reach  out other people or directly.

Retweetrank is a very interesting service which lets you keep an eye on the most retweeted people out there. A suggestion? You should follow all of them.

Facebook

For Facebook the story is a little bit different. As you may know, FB lets you be involved in lots of activities and it’s a great tool to spread the word about something through groups, pages, posts and so on.

Most people add you as a friend only if you are a real friend, family member, co-worker or someone they did business with. Policies are usually different depending on the people you are dealing with. Someone lets everyone become friend while others, like me, prefer to know the person I’m adding. Sometimes you share personal slices of your life that don’t want others to see and even if there are many privacy rules you can take advantage of, sometimes it’s not enough.

Even if many people, like me, think of Facebook mostly as a ludicrous spare time thing, you can effectively use it for business. Groups are the best way to leverage Facebook from this standpoint. You can create groups about your products and services and invite others to join, asking for feedback and engaging them with everything regarding your products/services.

Playing with Facebook lets you meet new people and many times you could find yourself making business with someone you wouldn’t ever have thought of, as it happens for Twitter.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is certainly the first service that comes up to my mind if you ask me about a business social network. It’s also the first one when it comes to get in touch with certain people or to look for a new job. I use it intensely and its main advantage is the ability, with a premium account, to send a direct email to the person you want to get in touch with, without intermediaries. A trick? Make your profile as much attractive as possible. Lots of contacts, lots of endorsements and a very well written profile are certainly the best way to increase the probability to persuade people to get back to you or, hopefully, switch to a face to face meeting.

Thanks to Linkedin, I signed many important new clients for my company’s customer engagement service Sitofono. Reason why, if I were you, I’d pay more attention to it.

Google Reader

Sometimes people are correlated by what they do, their common interests or simply by what they read. Google Reader, unlike other stand alone RSS aggregators, has the main advantage to provide you with easy tools to share what your are reading. This way, other people can take advantage of your recommendations and get in touch with you in order to get more comments or to share theirs with you. In a nutshell, it lets you start new conversations.

If you use Firefox, you can also power it with Feedly, a great extension which adds additional features to Google Reader. Sharing on Friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook hasn’t ever been easier.

Wordpress

With the advent of the so-called Web 2.0, all about “conversations”, static and one-way only news are history. People can easily leave comments to stories and authors can easily get in touch with their readers starting, sometimes, very interesting conversations. A lot of times I found out that the comments’ section of a blog post was much more interesting than the content of the post itself.

That said, starting a blog is one of the best things a person who wants to build a solid business network could do. It lets you meet new people and if you want to talk to some key figures in certain companies, just blog about those companies and you are more likely to be contacted by those people. I can’t count the number of people who joined my network through blogging. Ok, it’s clear that it’s not easy, it takes time to make your blog widely known, but it’s definitely worth the effort.

Are you convinced? Are you spending enough time to build your network through the tools/services described above? If not, well, it’s time for you to act very quickly. The risk is that others will do that before you and better than you and, at that point, the game is over. Sometimes the success of a product/service is a matter of talking to the right person at the right time and your competitors could potentially do that before you.

To start, don’t forget to get in touch with me through the buttons shown in the sidebar. Mention this post and I’ll add you in my network. Maybe I’m not the person who can make your business explode, but are you certain it’s not in my network?

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