How to Grow Your Business Network With Social Media

Is your business or company struggling to find new customers?

Do you know how to build your business network on social media?

Before you can sell, you have to create a trusted relationship with your future customer.

In this article, you’ll discover four ways to use social media to find and establish relationships with new prospects and leads for your business.

#1: Join a Conversation on Twitter

Tweet chats are great for person-to-person networking on Twitter and they can act as one of the single best lead generation tools in social media.

You can consult a number of lists to quickly locate chats that are relevant to you. These lists include hashtags and other key information like date, time and the name of the host or owner of the chat.

A tweet chat example.

The best thing about tweet chats is that while almost everyone starts out a stranger, over time the participants begin to know one another and develop relationships that extend beyond the regularly scheduled chat.

During the chat, you’ll find people who ask questions you can answer. Your replies will be limited to 140 characters, so they’ll need to be as concise as possible. Use the opportunity to let participants know you’re open to accepting a follow and a direct message from them and carrying the conversation further by phone or on another platform.

#2: Participate in LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn groups hold a lot of opportunity for networking with people who fit your prospect profile.

There’s an easy way to find the groups you are interested in. Hover on Interests in the header navigation and click on Groups. From here, click on More>> in the Groups You May Like box.

From here, use keywords specific to your industry to search for and find groups relevant to your business. You can filter your search results by Relationship, Categories and Languages.

Use the search function to identify the right groups for you to join.

 Next, check out each of those groups and join one or two that are made up of people who could be interested in what you offer.

This isn’t a place to sell. Be nice, be helpful and focus on providing service to the other members. Answer questions, give advice and share your knowledge.

Pay attention to who likes your posts and comments. Similar to Facebook, you canclick on the Like button to see a list of people who have liked your comment.

Follow the people who like your comments.

Visit the profiles of those folks and see if any of them fit your prospect profile. Follow them on LinkedIn to get to know them better and when the opportunity arises, ask them to connect with you.

Use tags to sort your new contacts into one of two groups—prospects and strategic partners who can refer prospects. The tags will make it easier for you to keep track of the relationships as they evolve.

If there’s not an existing group that fits your needs, create one to network with your current prospects and attract new ones.

#3: Share Insights From an Event

When you attend trade shows or conferences, share the highlights and notes with people who can’t attend and you’ll attract people interested in the same niche.

On Twitter, share your notes in real time with your followers. Use the official event hashtag in your tweets so they are included in the larger conversation, and they’ll be visible to people who don’t follow you. Make sure you pay attention to new follows during this time, as they could well be new prospects for you.

You can accomplish the same goal with your company’s website. A tool such asStorify will help you consolidate your notes into a blog post with a rundown of all of the most important points made during the conference.

This event recap blog post was created using Storify.

Pay attention to the folks who follow along, comment or retweet your information. This is a simple way to surface invisible prospects that you might otherwise miss. Connect with each person on the platform or network that makes the most sense, and when the time is right, reach out and offer your help.

#4: Interview the People You Want to Work With

Use social media video tools for more strategic networking.

Here’s how it works. First you create a list of people with whom you most want to work. Arrange to do a quick interview with each one.

Interview your subjects at industry conferences, launch events, maybe even in an airport during a layover. If you can’t be there in person, arrange to do the interview on a Google+ Hangout, then publish the video to YouTube.

Don’t introduce your own product or service into the equation; rather let your interviewee shine. Ask a question that encourages your subject to showcase his or her own expertise, then turn those interviews into helpful content and share them on your social networks.

Emma, an email marketing service, spent a year gathering interviews from social media influencers and used the content to initiate prospect conversations with numerous social media users.

DJ Waldow being interviewed by email marketing service Emma.

As conversations continued between Emma and a few of the interviewees, some of them became Emma’s customers. Other interview subjects invited Emma to sponsor or have representatives speak at high-profile social media conferences, during which the company was able to increase awareness of its platform.

Interviews help you to build your business network.

Over to You

These four techniques can help you form relationships with people who are interested in what you offer.

As people learn to trust you and your knowledge, your relationships with these people will strengthen. And these people will be more open to buying from you than from someone they have no history with.

What do you think? Have you used any of these tips to meet prospects? What other tips can you share? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

10 Ways to Use Your Personal Facebook Profile for Business

Are you wondering how to use your personal Facebook profile for your business?

One of the reasons Facebook is effective is the personal connection you can make with people.

In this article I’ll show you 10 ways you can use your personal Facebook profile to impact your business.

Why My Personal Facebook Profile?

Your Facebook profile and Facebook business page can work together today.

On one hand, it’s important for a company to have a professional Facebook business page that’s in line with the company’s messaging, target audience and branding.

But the way you use your Facebook personal profile can also play a role in the success of social media for your business, and this is often overlooked.

First remember that according to Facebook’s Terms of Service, you’re not allowed to use your personal profile strictly for business.

You can't use your Facebook personal profile strictly for business.

However, there are many ways you can leverage the activities in your personal profile to benefit your business and build relationships with current and past customers.

That being said, you may decide to keep your professional and personal lives and social media activities separate.

But as we connect and keep in touch in ways that were impossible before, our personal and professional personas blend together today. So you may consider this separation is no longer realistic for your social media marketing.

When you open up and allow some of your personality to blend into the conversations you have with your professional contacts, you can gain trust and respect from your clients and customers. And you can do this on your Facebook profile.

Here are 10 ways to leverage your personal Facebook profile for business.

#1: Allow Follows to Your Personal Profile

The Follow function allows people to see all of your public updates without you having to accept them as a friend and see their updates in your news feed.

Connect with anyone on Facebook with the Follow function.

After you turn on the Follow option in your settings, you’ll want to pay attention to the privacy settings in the posts you share on your personal profile. When you post a status update to your profile, you can choose to make it visible to Friends, to any lists you have set up or to Public.

Use this feature to filter updates about your family to Friends, and updates about your business or things that you’re comfortable sharing publicly to Public. Your privacy stays intact and your industry content remains highly visible.

When posting to Facebook, choose your audience.

The other great thing about this feature is that anyone you don’t accept as a friend automatically becomes a follower, so you can quickly and easily build up a big audience with little effort.

You can quickly amass a large number of followers.

#2: Celebrate Moments

How do you share about your business or company without talking about it in an annoying way? Celebrate moments.

You’re sure to have amazing moments at your company that are awesome to share, a fun Friday afternoon BBQ, a promotion for someone on the team or the addition of an exciting new feature or widget to your product or service.

The way that you talk about these things is key.

This isn’t a press release, and this isn’t your company business page. This is your personal Facebook page, so use language and tone that’s in line with who you are and your personality.

Check into company events or post a fun photo. Share something exciting, funny or behind-the-scenes, just as you’d share a moment that happened with your family or friends.

Checking into a company event on Facebook is a great way to connect with people personally.

#3: Catch People Doing Something Right

Use your Facebook personal profile to publicly recognize and congratulate a colleague on a job promotion, a career move or just for doing an incredible job. When you post the status update, make sure to tag the person.

Depending on the context, you may want to post the update publicly or within a private company group. People crave recognition, and what better forum to recognize someone than in a group with their peers!

Recognize your peers publicly. Make sure to tag them!

#4: Use Graph Search to Reach Influencers

With the new Graph Search, you have the ability to expand your network and connect with people who are influencers in your world. Perhaps you want to reach out to someone at another company, a potential client or customer or even a journalist.

In Graph Search, type: “Friends of friends who work for (company)”.

Use Graph Search to expand your network.

Leveraging the power of friends of friends is still in its infancy in the social media world, but in real life we’ve been doing this for years. Ask your friends and colleagues to introduce you to second- and third-tier connections.

Now with Graph Search, you can easily see whom you’re connected to via friends of friends and then reach out to them to see if they would be so kind as to introduce you to each other in a private message.

#5: Tell Your Story

When your personal profile becomes more focused on what you’re excited and passionate about, it’s natural to include a small number of posts about your company. It’s a great opportunity to tell the story of what it feels like to love what you do or where you work!

These posts provide a great opportunity to include a tag for anyone in the post who’s appropriate and to use relevant hashtags that are now searchable, so your post is seen by a wider audience.

Tell the story of why you love what you do.

#6: Tag Your Company Photos

While you can’t tag people in a photo on your company Facebook business page, you can tag people you’re personally friends with. You can also revive the life of an old photo post by tagging it, which brings it back into the news feed.

When you tag someone, they receive a notification, it goes onto their timeline and, depending on their settings, it may also get into their news feed. This widens the number of people who see the post, thereby increasing likes and engagement for your page.

Make sure you tag responsibly and only tag people who are in the photo.

Tag photos posted on your Facebook business page.

#7: Leave Facebook Voice Messages

One of the recent upgrades to Facebook private messages is the addition ofFacebook voice messages. This easy-to-use feature is often overlooked.

Simply go to your Messages using either the Facebook mobile app or the Facebook Messenger mobile app and record a message of any length.

Reach out and send someone a personal voice greeting for a birthday or any other occasion. It’s a little thing that most people still don’t know about, so it’s a great way to surprise colleagues, customers or clients to let them know you’re thinking about them.

Facebook voice messages are a great way to connect with people.

#8: Give a Facebook Gift

People are sharing more than ever before on social networks. Are you paying attention to what’s happening with your key clients, customers and contacts? Did one of them recently get married? Receive a job promotion? Have a baby?

Facebook Gifts make it easy to surprise them with a thoughtful and unexpected gift. Simply choose the gift, pick the recipient, fill out a card and add your credit card information. Then, the recipient gets a notification that they received a gift, accepts it and fills out their mailing address. It’s that simple!

Facebook gifts are a great way to surprise and delight customers, clients and colleagues.

You can spend $5, $100 or more to send a Starbucks card to a coffee addict, adonation to someone’s favorite charity, a nice bottle of wine or even some yummy treats.

Facebook Gifts let you give to charities as well as send physical gifts.

#9: Find More Intel on the People You Want to Work With

Before you pick up the phone or send an email to a potential client or job applicant, do you Google them? Do you Google their Facebook profile?

It’s one thing to see their professional experience on LinkedIn, but it’s another to see what they post publicly on Facebook—to see who they are as a person. View your customers’ Facebook presence to help you get to know them and learn how to build a rapport with them.

You can search for someone on Facebook using Facebook Graph Search, but I’ve found Google searches to be more effective.

Google someone to find him or her on Facebook.

#10: Set Up Facebook Lists

I saved my favorite tip for last. One of the most important things you can do to leverage your personal profile for business is to set up custom lists.

I recommend you set up a list for current customers and clients whom you’re connected to on Facebook, and remember to set up a list for potential customers and clients.

Now, instead of seeing posts from the hundreds of people you’re connected to, yousee the people who are most relevant to your business. This makes it easy tocomment on, like and share any of their content that resonates with you. But it must happen from your personal profile for it to feel and be authentic.

Look at your lists on a daily basis to keep in touch with important people.

Make it a point to look at these lists every day. This is where you see people share their ups and downs, their family, their vacations, their favorite restaurants and the things that make them tick.

Engage with them. Every like, comment and share adds up because relationships are built with small interactions over the course of time. Connect with them through a post, a Facebook voice message, a Facebook gift or even an old-fashioned phone call to build a long-term relationship.

Over to You

Instead of approaching your Facebook updates randomly, put a plan in place andconnect with people intentionally on your Facebook profile.

Start thinking beyond the status update and take advantage of the enormous opportunities to leverage your personal profile for business to build stronger relationships with your professional contacts.

What do you think? How you are leveraging your personal profile to build your business? Please leave me a comment below or send me a tweet!

Facebook Enables Post Edits: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.

What’s New This Week?

Facebook Lets You Edit Posts After Sharing on Web and Mobile: You now have the option to edit your Facebook updates. This works now on the web and the Facebook Android app, and iOS capability is coming soon.

You can now edit posts after sharing them.

Twitter Adds Rich Photo Experience in Embedded Tweets: Now photos in embedded tweets are bigger and there’s a “bold visual focus on the media.”

Embedded Twitter posts with photos now look better.

Pinterest Article Pins Share More Information: Articles pinned on Pinterest “will now have more information—including the headline, author, story description and link—right on the pin.”

"When you find articles about things you're passionate about—such as science, travel, parenting or health—they're easier to save and organize on Pinterest."

YouTube Integrates Comments With Google+: “In the coming months, comments from people you care about will rise up where you can see them, while new tools will help video creators moderate conversations for welcome and unwelcome voices.”

"Starting this week, you'll see the new YouTube comments powered by Google+ on your channel discussion tab. This update will come to comments on all videos later this year." Here's what comments will look like later this year in a sample video from SoulPancake.

Twitter Announces New Push Notification: “With this new feature, you’ll receive personalized recommendations when multiple people in your network follow the same user or favorite or retweet the same tweet.”

YouTube Launches Audio Library: “Any YouTube creator now has access to more than 150 royalty-free instrumental tracks you can use for free, forever, for any creative purpose (not just YouTube videos).”

"You can browse the tracks by mood, genre, instrument and duration."

LinkedIn Introduces Sponsored Jobs to Feed: LinkedIn gives Sponsored Jobs “even more visibility by incorporating them into one of the most engaging spots on LinkedIn: the LinkedIn feed on the member homepage.”

"This change gives your Sponsored Jobs even more opportunities to be seen by the best passive and active candidates as they browse through news, content and updates from their network—and brings Sponsored Jobs to mobile for the first time."

Instagram Redesigns Mobile: For iOS 7 Instagram has “increased the size of photos and videos in your feed so that they expand to the edges of your screen.”

Instagram has "made profile pictures circular so Instagram feels at home on your phone."

Klout Redesigns Profiles: The profile page now has “a fresh new design so that it’s easier for others to get a sense of who you are online.”

"When viewing your friends' profiles, you'll have an opportunity to give them +K in the topics you think they're influential about."

Klout Introduces Cinch: Cinch is a new mobile app for iOS that delivers a way to get personalized advice. “Cinch uses Klout’s technology platform and data assets to understand the questions you ask and then match them to the most relevant potential advisors.”

"Cinch helps everyone get timely advice about a range of lifestyle-related questions, such as home improvement, parenting and more, from knowledgeable advisors."

Don’t miss this:

Social Media Success Summit 2013 Starts Next Week!

Social Media Success Summit 2013 is a special online conference designed to help you master social media marketing (brought to you by Social Media Examiner).

Social Media Success Summit 2013.

Forty-five of the world’s leading social media pros will show you how. Instructors include Jay Baer (author, Youtility), Chris Brogan (co-author, Impact Equation),Mari Smith (co-author, Facebook Marketing), Michael Stelzner (founder, Social Media Examiner), Mark Schaefer (author, Return on Influence), Jesse Stay (author,Google+ for Dummies), Amy Porterfield (co-author, Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies) and experts from General Electric, Sony, E! Online, Kelly Servicesand Discovery Channel–just to mention a few. Fully online. Click here to learn more.

What do you think? Please share your comments below.