With twitters explosion into mainstream established media, many people are looking to leverage the use of social media to market themselves and / or their business on-line. So naturally this question arises. How can I best use social networking sites (such as Linkedin, Ecademy, Naymz, Plaxo, Facebook) and blogs to maximise my resources. Then come all the competing calls upon our time, revenues and staff. I think the following four strategies are worth considering, they are not unique. Each of the 4 can morph from one into the other, but without a clear plan of which strategy you are using you are presently likely to waste hours each week on social media.
1. Blogging and feeding these into social networking sites to gain exposure and meet others with similar attitudes.
Advantages: Blogging will automatically sort your readers into followers or not. If your thoughts are not incisive and not alignment with the readers of the blog you are unlikely to gain contacts, but you will still be creating your brand. You can be very specific as to your thoughts and attitudes, so that the contacts you make are much more likely to want to work with you.
Disadvantages: It takes a serious amount of time to blog. You could be interpreted as being something you are not unless you are very careful with your wording.
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2. Splattergun approach and linking
Sounds very random, but in truth it is not. The idea is to join many social networking, video sharing, bookmarking, ranking and blogging sites and do a little on all of the different media to gain your presence.
Advantages: After initial effort the work load should reduce. Loads of freedom inside this method. With the variety of media, quite fun to work the different varities.
Disadvantages: Takes real effort to complete the task, long time to really establish your brand fully. Unless you are very careful with the settings on emails, the white noise from social networking can be very demanding.
3. Hot Spot(s), hubs and daisy chaining
This is concentrating your efforts on one site (hub) or a few sites (hot spots) but linking several more to each one. This is the preferred method of many because the habits of visiting one site mean you make a bigger presence on that site more speedily and feel like you are genuinely establishing a brand. Then you link one site to another to another (daisy chaining) and it feeds traffic back to you as people look for you elsewhere.
Advantages: Easy to create good habits. Easy to establish a reputation. Quite a fun method to network.
Disadvatages: Your brand may not be secure, someone else may be using it elsewhere. Quite time consuming as your loyalty to one site may get nearer to a partial addiction, as you start to enjoy it. It could become very social, which makes it harder to spend less time than you really wish to spend on it.
4. Employ someone else to do it for you.
Advantages: Takes all the strain out of it. Should mean that they know how to do it better than you do. Allows you to concentrate on other things. Money saved if you can better use your time on other parts of the business.
Disadvantages: They need to understand your business and business in general and they may not do. You may be deluged with enquiries, that never reach sales. Extra cost. The feeling of a lack of control.
Summary
All methods work, you must decide which one fits your style, business and personality. The nice thing is that you can change strategies as your needs and goals change.
