Disappointed with Social Networking?

Q: I’ve been on Twitter for a little while and find it, like other social networks, to be a great go-to place for advice and learning from others. But does it really help you grow your business?

A: Many business owners get rather frustrated when they don’t see any tangible results from all their social networking efforts. All the new knowledge, inspiration, and free downloads are great. But what’s even greater is getting more paying clients. So after a few weeks or months of being obsessed with network-building and messaging, many businesses get disappointed and stop all their efforts.

Sure, there’s been too much hype over social networks lately. They are often (mis)represented as a perfect one-size-fits-all marketing tool that is cheap, easy and fantastic. But there’s also a misconception that just “getting on” social neworks will solve all the problems. And then the reality sets in…

Is there anything can be done to improve the tangible results of social networking efforts?

Social networking is not like FedEx – The results are not achieved overnight. Well, Social networking is reputation-driven. Reputation is not built overnight. You don’t expect quick results from more traditional marketing efforts, do you? So, continue spending time building the relationships and growing trust and your business reputation before you start seeing results.

Know what is it that you want – Set your goals before setting out on a social networking campaign. What kind of results are you hoping to achieve with social networking? Is it traffic to your website, referrals, new clients, downloads of your info product, subscriptions to your newsletter, invitations to be a guest speaker, etc?

Be the man or woman with a plan – have a schedule and a “time budget”. Sure, it doesn’t take much money (if any) to market through social networks. But it sure does take a lot of time. If you don’t have a plan before you log into your account and start looking for new connections or checking the network updates, you’re going to end up wasting hours of your time without anything to show for it.

Track, measure and analyze – Make sure that you have tools in place to measure the results from. Otherwise, you don’t know whether you’re achieving your goals. More importantly, if you are not, then there’s no way for you to figure out why. For example, you might be getting a lot of traffic to your site from your social networks, but your visitors don’t become clients. The problem in this case is with the website, not with the social networking efforts. But if you don’t track visitors and traffic sources, you will assume that your social marketing campaign is not sending you any clients.

Be the action hero – Huh? If your goal is to bring people to your website or blog, make sure that you set up the next step for them, such as signing up for a newsletter or subscribing to the RSS feed. Same goes for all other goals you set for your social networking campaign.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, social media, social networks

Related posts:

1. Social Networks – Are You in the Right Ones?
2. How is Social Media Used for Business?
3. How to Build Your Social Media Strategy