Social networking can be highly rewarding provided you know how to use it for your own benefit. Primarily there are three types of people who actively use social networking tools and websites: those who have got nothing better to do and simply kill their time; those who believe it can really help their business but are not sure how; and those who have a clear-cut strategy and know how they want to reach from point A to point B using an effective social networking strategy.
Effective strategy works everywhere, and it has the same effect on social networking too. But when it’s mostly chaos and noise, how do you come up with a strategy so that you can actually leverage from the true potential of social networking?
Firstly, you must decide what social networking medium works for you. Is it blogging, Twitter, FaceBook, Flickr or YouTube? Or a mixture of multiple tools. You have to keep in mind that it demands time. If you blog, you constantly have to create relevant and high-quality content, and along with that you constantly have to market your blog, at least for the initial few months. Twitter? Then it’s all about conversation and visibility. Whom to follow, and what kind of followers to attract? What sort of content you should post? How do you portray yourself – as an employee of a company, or an individual? FaceBook? The same thing.
Social networking is not a one-time affair. It’s not like, once you have established a presence you are constantly going to attract attention. There are so many people using social networking websites that even if you go away for a couple of weeks they are going to forget about you, and worse, they won’t even notice that you’re not posting or participating.
As an effective social networking strategy, you have to clearly identify your audience and you have to define your voice. Above all, you must know from where you are coming, and to where you are going.
