One of my new business-to-business clients was new to the world of Social Media marketing  and we selected LinkedIN, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr (for image marketing) to get them up and running. Although we have created connectivity with other social media sites, the above 4 will be the message drivers.  Once we created the accounts, we had no contacts which raised the question of ” How do I get contacts to begin networking via social media”. While the following addresses Twitter, facebook, LinkedIn and Flickr the techniques pretty much apply to all social media networking.  I offer the client the following which has proved to be very successful:

Step 1: Upload your contact database

The majority of the Social Media platforms import contacts from an online email accounts, so the very first step is to upload you contact database to either Google or Yahoo mail

Step 2: Invite contacts from your database to  become part of your social media network, as follows:

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/invitations/find_on_contacts

Import contacts from: Yahoo, Gmail and AOL

Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages#!/invite.php?ref=sb

Import contacts from: Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and Windows live Hotmail

LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/secure/importAndInvite?trk=hb_add_conn

Import contacts from: Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and Windows live Hotmail plus LinkedIn does permit you to upload direct from your desktop email program

Flickr

http://www.flickr.com/import/people/

Import contacts from: Yahoo, Gmail,  and Windows live Hotmail

Step 3: market your social media connections

1)     Complete your bios and make them appealing to your target audience

2)     Encourage your  followers and fans to retransmit your posts to their  social media  friends.

3)     Your staff  and personal friends can really help the cause  by occasionally posting something about your business on their  social media platforms

4)     Link to you social media connections every where: website, email (including the email signatures of your staff), forum signatures etc

5)     Include in all hard copy marketing collateral: business cards, flyers etc

Step 4: Addition Twitter specific actions

  • Send Twitpics, photos of your products  but use hashtags to identify them,  in the hope that they will be retweeted  which will build brand.

Once these steps have been completed we can move into the world of a paid promotional marketing strategy but I will address that in a future article.