You’ve taken the beginning steps to creating an online social presence. You’ve started “tweeting” a bit on Twitter, you have a page set up on Facebook and your business profile is on LinkedIn. You’ve even added your colleagues and friends to some of these sites as contacts. But there is new information and Web 2.0 applications for online networking daily, it seems, and you don’t know if you should spend the time learning it all. You also don’t know if you are using it like you should. Here are some suggestions on ways to keep this process easy and enjoyable for you.
FriendFeed is a social networking site that consolidates all of your other sites into one. This includes MySpace (if you have it), Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr and more so you can see your contacts’ activity across multiple sites (IF they have taken the time to join Friend Feed). Many people want to limit their online activity to one or two sites so it may be difficult to encourage them to join yet another.
Ping.fm is a must! This Web based app (www.ping.fm) allows you to update your status across platforms. Log in and you can update your status on the “big three”: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, all from one spot. It supports many other sites as well. This allows you to be active without being logged into all the sites. Plus it is an easy and effective way to spread the word when you have a new blog post or business venture.
HootSuite and TweetDeck are two great Twitter dashboard applications that will help you manage your activity on that site. HootSuite is Web-based and TweetDeck is a download, but both have similar features. Both of these sites allow you to manage multiple profiles if you have them for different business purposes. You can also watch your feeds and in TweetDeck you can create groups to watch more closely if you are following a lot of people.
If you are struggling with how to find appropriate and interesting people to follow on Twitter, you can use WeFollow.com. WeFollow is a directory where members can list themselves under three keywords. For instance, if you are an entrepreneur, you would likely use “entrepreneur”, “small business”, “marketing” or something similar. Thus you can do a search for members by keyword. Additionally, if you do a search on the main Twitter dashboard (using a hash mark helps: #smallbusiness), you can find discussions on a topic and find individuals to follow who have the same interests as you.
To build a loyal following, you have to interact and support other members on these sites. One way to do this on Twitter is to “retweet”…that is to share an update that someone else has added to expose them (and their information) to more followers. Or if someone says something you find interesting, you can reply to them using the @ sign and their screen name (i.e. @stevenschlagel, but remember-this is public and anyone can see it). Finally, you can privately message, called a DM – direct message, to interact on a one-on-one level. All of this is likely to garner you more support online!
You can build relationships on LinkedIn by using a couple of features. The first is “Answers” at the top of the page. Drop this down and you will see you can either post a question or answer one, all of which is divided by topic. Answering questions let’s you designate yourself as an expert in certain topic. LinkedIn also has a groups section so prepare to join several of these based on your career or interests. Each group has a discussion section that you can get involved in and you can also invite these members to join your network.
Remember, always, that social networking online is not much different from networking in person. The goals are to connect and contribute to those around you. If you always seek opportunities to serve others, you will automatically find that others are excited to serve you in return!