Client Magnets Official Blog

Posts Tagged ‘social networking’

Start connecting and building relationships with twitter conversations.

Social media platforms provide a great opportunity to build a rapport with potential clients or business partners online, even when you can’t communicate regularly in person. You can use Twitter to build a rapport with people you’ve never met, or to stay in contact with people you meet at an event or conference. Twitter, in particular, makes it easy to have low-pressure conversations, get to know people, and expand the networking you can do at conferences and conventions.

Build a Rapport Before You Meet
One of the best things about Twitter is that it provides you with an easy way to build a rapport with potential clients or business contacts before you ever meet. You can network with people via Twitter weeks or months before an event, and you may even schedule an event because of your connections via Twitter. When you do meet at an event, you don’t have to go through the awkward “getting to know you” phase – you already have an established relationship with the person you’ve been chatting with via Twitter.

If you’re meeting a potential client, Twitter provides you with a great advantage over your competition because you can establish yourself as a person and an expert in your field via social media before you ever meet your client. With prior association, clients and potential business partners are more likely to make a decision to do business with you.

Use Twitter to Follow Up with Contacts
Twitter is also a great way for you to follow up with contacts you meet at conferences and events. These networking events can be challenging because you’re trying to meet and talk to as many people as possible, and you have a limited amount of time to spend with each person. The people you meet are also trying to meet people, and they, too, have a limited amount of time to spend with you. In the past, this has meant that you sometimes miss out on valuable networking opportunities because you spent too long with someone, and didn’t have enough time to spend with someone else.

You can meet and talk to someone for a few minutes, and then follow up via Twitter. You can send a message the next day or days later, and continue your conversation online. This enables you to build a deeper relationship with people than you typically can at a conference, and it also gives you an opportunity to talk with more people.

Twitter is a Great Low-Pressure Networking Tool
Because Twitter consists of sending short messages, it’s a great low-pressure networking tool. You can send short messages to everyone on your list, or even have conversations with an individual via Twitter. Most Twitter exchanges are one or two sentences long due to the character limitation. This means you don’t have to be brilliant to shine in a Twitter conversation, and you don’t have to worry about carrying on lengthy exchanges.

So starting today.  Let me encourage you to devote a few minutes per day to Twitter.  Start building relationships with twitter conversations and I promise you, you will see a reward for your time investment.

Twitter is just one of the methods I use to attract a steady stream of new clients.   If you’d like to know more about attracting new clients and achieving real business success I invite you to join me for my upcoming free teleseminar series – “7 Secrets for Attracting New Clients”.  Register for FREE here:   “7 Secrets For Attracting New Clients”.

Social networking platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, give you a powerful new tool for connecting with potential prospects, clients, sales leads and new business partners. Because of the nature of social networking, successful social networking is about more than just creating a marketing campaign and sending it out into the ether. Social networking is a social process, and it works best when your personality shines through to your social networking contacts. With the right techniques, you can build your personality on social networking platforms and improve your social networking success.

Offer Advice: One way you can get real personal, real fast with your contacts is to offer advice or even just sympathetic comments. Listen to what people say, and respond to them even when it’s not related to your business. This is a fast and easy way to form personal connections with people, which can lead to unexpected business opportunities. Additionally, by offering advice or sharing information about related things in your life, you’re letting people find out more about you as a person and letting your personality shine through your social networking.

Share Personal Information: Share personal information via Twitter and Facebook. For years, people have had distinctive mindsets of “this is business” and “personal is for friends.” Let your business contacts be your friends, too. When you share information about your diet, or struggling with the conflicts of being a parent and business person, you’re sharing personal information that lets other people see that you’re not just a faceless business – you’re an individual.

The things that you share might resonate with your followers, and give them a reason to keep following you beyond your business information. People are also more likely to refer friends to other friends for business opportunities than to faceless strangers, so if you and your business can become a friend, you’ll get more business opportunities.

Find Ways to Blend Business and Personal: Find ways to blend business and personal updates. If all of your updates are personal, your followers who aren’t particularly interested in your business might just go away. If you share personal information, too, your followers may be interested in you as a person and continue to follow, even if they don’t find your business particularly interesting.

By blending business with personal updates, you can share information about your business without being blatant. For example, you could say something like “Going to Ireland to speak for business, and taking my husband along as an anniversary gift.” This lets people know that you’re a successful business person who travels and speaks, but also shares information about your personal life – that you and your husband have an anniversary.

Be Genuine: The most important thing about sharing your personality through social networking is to be genuine. Don’t give fake updates tailored just to get a reaction from your followers; be forthright and honest, and people will respect your integrity. If you let your personality shine through to your social networking followers, you’ll find yourself with a bigger pool of followers, which potentially gives you more business opportunities.

Bernadette Doyle created Client Magnets Ltd to help self-employed people solve one of their biggest business problems: attract a steady stream of clients. If you’d like to receive invaluable tips and advice on how to attract clients with ease, register at http://www.clientmagnets.com