Make New Friends- Building Connections with Social Media and Content
Make New Friends By Building Connections on Social media.
Depending on which social media site you are using, there is a different level of difficulty involved for building connections.
Sure you can get likes, new followers, etc. But that’s the easy part (and I don’t say that lightly).
Taking those likes and follows to another level is a completely different story.
To start with turning a like or follow into a relationship takes a lot of time.
Time in today’s world that most businesses don’t want to spend, because:
They don’t know how to do it effectively, or they don’t think they have the time to do it.
The trick is that every company has to do it, because that is the way sales are beginning to work, where you have a relationship, you go first to purchase.
Either way, it’s a time investment.
There are two ways to spend the time it takes to build relationships in social media. Both are effective in their own ways, and both take time. Let’s look at both of them a bit in-depth:
Method #1- Reaching Out to Existing or New Followers
Time is spent reaching out to new fans, getting to know them, and spending time with them.
Who Uses This Method?– Startups are known to use this method because they understand the importance of every connection, they might have more time to reach out to each new person, and until they become popular they don’t usually have hundreds of new followers a day, meaning it’s not difficult to do.
New bloggers use this as they are also working on their reach and exposure and understand the benefit of every follow.
Here’s how it is done:
Twitter– When a new fan follows you
- You check their profile to see who they are, do they have a bio– what does it say?
- Do they have a link? Visit it- what can you learn about them?
- What do their previous tweets have to say? Are they a great resource, are they more of a chatter? Remember this
- Send them a message- don’t immediately try to do business with them, make friends first
- Respond to their replies, offer email, skype or other connection possibilities when it feels right
- Retweet their posts
- Do this by adding them to a list of people you want to retweet
- Check the list a few times a day and retweet people to your Buffer, or…
- Use tweetadder and have it automatically retweet a couple of their posts a day, or…
- Have tweetadder automatically tweet their websites posts (Tweetfeeder does this as well)
- They will most likely respond to thank you, giving you more opportunity to get them chatting
- Reply to their shares and tweets, building conversation and asking questions
Linkedin–
The process is fairly similar on Linkedin, but you can make a few changes:
- Check out their profile and decide if you want to connect
- Visit their website, subscribe if you do want to connect
- Accept their connection
- Send them a welcome message and offer to connect on Skype or Twitter
- Add their profile to FiveHundredPlus and stay in touch with them on a regular basis
- Share their updates, or at least respond to them occasionally
- Comment on their updates
What’s the most important thing you can learn from all of this? That connecting with each person individually is the best way to build relationships through reaching out.
Imagine you are in a room of 30 people, how can you connect with each of them? Walking through the crowd and introducing yourself is one option.
Method #2- Be Of Great Value
A favorable way to build connections for many is content marketing.
But it isn’t simply writing a blog post to share each day or two, it has much more to do with the quality of the content.
And the more in-depth you can get, the more authority you seem to have.
Don’t merely skim the top of the lists of things people want to know, or answer questions those who are new to your industry ask.
Instead answer the questions that seasoned veterans will have, as they are the people more passionate about your industry and their shares are more useful to you.
Content must be useful to readers, or it will not be useful to your business!
What kind of content can you share? Although it depends on your industry, here are some examples:
- Pools-
- Why You Should Upgrade From An Above Ground to Ingroud Pool
- 5 Reasons You Should Change Your Pool to a Salt Water Filtering System
- Dogs-
- Training Your Dog to Roll Over
- Swimming with Your Dog
- Woodworking-
- Working with Difficult Woods
- Expensive Tools Worth the Investment
- Blogging-
- 40 Point Blogging Checklist (shameless plug)
- Hiring Writers for Your Growing Blog
- Parenting-
- 5 Tips for Dealing With Sibling Issues
- How To Get Your Teen Interested in College
Your content needs to motivate people to take action, to respond to what you have to say. You can do this in a variety of ways, such as:
- Sharing stories that resonate with them
- Giving life changing tips or strategies and discussing how they helped you
- Asking them to respond
- Running a contest or giveaway based on response
- Solving their problems
- Answering the questions they ask
- Using keyword research to see what they want
I can’t stress enough the importance of content that stands out, that helps like nothing else, and delivers so much quality your follower has no choice but to share.
Imagine a book that truly changes your way of thinking, or an article that makes you stop what you are doing, and rethink strategy. This is the kind of content you need to share.
Admittedly, not every piece of content can be great. All websites need a foundation of content for new visitors, but when you do write something amazing, that is the time to use every content distribution method you can to make sure it gets in front of the readers who need it most.
Conclusion to Connecting With Social Media & Stellar Content
While I have each way of connecting listed separately, they work together even better, when you have the time to commit to doing both.
If you can only do one of these, select the one that makes the most sense for you. As your business grows you should be able to hire more help to benefit from multiple connection strategies.
What do you think? Share your comments below, and if you’ve found this blog post useful, please help me share it with others.
