That Social Networking thing!!

Many a times I am asked whether social networking is worth it ( Yes) and why it is so tough ( No, it isn’t).

Social Net Working ??
All screenshots and trademarks are acknowledged of respective owners.

So here I am putting together a bare bones essential set of Social Networks dos to help you be […]

Many a times I am asked whether social networking is worth it ( Yes) and why it is so tough ( No, it isn’t).

Social Net Working ??
All screenshots and trademarks are acknowledged of respective owners.

So here I am putting together a bare bones essential set of Social Networks dos to help you be a social networking master.

1) LinkedIn

Profile – Go and create a LinkedIn profile at www.linkedin.com ( if you don’t have one, I suggest you create it and then come back to the article).

Make sure your LinkedIn profile has the following

Nice presentable professional photo
Correct Work history
Good and Verifiable Recommendations
Enough keywords to help people searching for people of your skills
Make your profile visible with a customized URL (as in www.linkedin.com/in/ajayohri )

Groups – Join enough enough groups of both primary skills and secondary hobbies (limited to 5) .Introduce yourself there. Create a group and invite people if you feel like doing so ( Our group now has 700 people on LinkedIn). You can export the group email addresses in a csv , put this for a newsletter from www.feedblitz.com or invite them for a www.ning.com special networking site.

Connections – LinkedIn will help you import your address book from email providers , and even csv files . Send invitations to people you know, a Don’t Know on your invitation will set a bar on your ability to send invitations again.

Open Networking – Open networkers accept invitations from all, do not flag any invitation as I Do not know. They feel that the small loss of privacy is much smaller than the huge variety of contacts they get- especially since most people have shared their email address to many people. It is recommended you choose a Gmail email for open networking to handle any spam etc.You need to join groups like Top Linked.com ,Invite Me, Linkedin500, LION (LinkedIn Open Networkers) and display your email address for people to connect to you.If you connect to people having a lot of connections already, you get their network as a second tier network so it is smarter to just connect to the top 50-100 most LinkedIn people.

2) Ning.com – This is for small communities , and you can create customized communities based on your interests or join existing ones. You can even put ads and earn from the ads, pat a small amount to ning.com to transfer your domain name to a ning.com website. The best such community I have seen is www.analyticbrdige.com thanks especially to the hard work put there and quality of people coming in. More interactive the community, more buzz it spreads, and attracts even more people- It is a circle of virtue.Opposite for low activity communities.You choose and create a group on a big existing community rather than re invent the wheel by creating a small community on your own.

3) Facebook.com – You can create a Facebook page for your business, send invites asking your friends and customers to be fans , give updates via Facebook, even set multiple levels of what people can see or cant see in your Facebook profile to separate your friends with your business associates. The groups features on Facebook is just as well designed as for LinkedIn.

4) Twitter.com – A very good article on using Twitter is by Sandro here http://smartdatacollective.com/Home/16336

Twitter can help you attract many small followers, and you can give updates of your website or your business created to your clients ,associates,colleagues,friends and the whole world. It can even be chosen as a live chat for customer service or for answering questions.It has privacy options as well so you can send it only to the people whom you choose to connect with.

LinkedIn, Facebook, Ning and Twitter – 4 great ways to start social networking and get free publicity for your business and your website.

5) Blogs – Blogs or weblogs can be created on www.blogspot.com and www.wordpress.com for writing about your product and service in semi informal manner.

It is recommended you create your own website and do your blog there ( see previous article at www.decisionstats.com )

Add www.Skype.com for communicating with people all over the world without exposing your phone number and a Website for displaying your goods and services, and your Web 2.0 strategy for a small player trying to survive the recession is ready to begin.

And that my dear reader, was the social networking thing !!! Let me know your comments and thoughts below