For a long time, networking has been seen as one of the best ways to grow a business. This is because it helps to expose your brand to a wider audience, and this is often enough to help you grow a small company into a larger one in a relatively short amount of time. However, networking can also backfire if used incorrectly or if you take it too lightly. There are many ways to screw up your networking opportunities and, if you’re not careful enough, it can be an easy way down to business ruin.
To help you grow your business, we’ve put together some networking tips that will showcase just how powerful networking is, but also just how easy it is to grow your business if you’re willing to put in some effort.
Pick a Persona and Stick With It
Your business’s social media profiles need to actively represent your company. This is easier said than done most of the time because you need to put a heavy emphasis on personality. It’s much easier to create a persona for your business if you’re willing to hire a separate social media manager or a community handler to ensure that your online persona stays consistent and personalized to your company.
A good example of how an internet persona is used correctly is the popular fast food chain, Wendy’s. The person in charge of Wendys’ Twitter account is full of jokes, stabs at other companies and plenty of brutal puns. This has created a personality that social media users can identify with, laugh at or simply just remember. It’s a memorable experience to look through some of the older tweets by Wendy’s, and their personality is what made them stick out so much. Social media management isn’t just fun and games, however. Most tweets need approval before they’re sent out because the last thing you want is a public relations disaster on your hands, and this is what makes social media management deceptively difficult and potentially lethal to your business.
In short, decide on an internet persona and stick with it. The last thing you want is to give your customers a dull and boring online persona with boring messages that are uninteresting and uninspired, hence the importance of a dedicated social media manager. If you’re interested in creating a social media presence that can grow your business, then it’s important to stick to a business persona.
Utilizing Facebook
Facebook is arguably one of the best platforms to flex your social media muscles on. This is because Facebook is fantastic for virtually everything related to building an online presence and networking. Facebook itself is also really easy to use. Even if you’re stuck on a feature or don’t understand how to do something, you can simply contact the Facebook support number and get in touch with a real human being for assistance. It doesn’t get more convenient than this and many people don’t see the true potential of Facebook and how it can be utilized for business growth through networking.
You can find a leads group on sites like Facebook and you can grow your customer or client network by using advertisements, from getting positive reviews by satisfied customers and also by posting pictures, videos and other types of content that will help you grow your business.
It’s also possible to use third-party applications and software to help you manage customer relations on social media. If you’re interested, then you’ll need to hire a Salesforce consultant or a similar employee to help you grasp the basics of networking on Facebook and how you can actively use it to grow your company.
Merging Paid Advertising and Social Media
A popular way to utilize your social media networking is to actually mix it with your paid advertising. Many people focus on organic reach and it’s a given considering it’s one of the more trusted methods of growing your audience. However, it’s also a good idea to remember that even if you rank #1 in terms of organic ranking on Google, you’re still not the first search result–those are reserved for paid advertising.
Social media is known as a difficult platform to break into as a relatively new business because it’s hard to grow from nothing, but it’s also seen as one of the best ways to engage your audience and get people talking about your business or services. To get the best of both worlds, many businesses are now bidding on search terms and their brand keywords and linking to social media posts or blog entries instead of their actual business website. This is because, in addition to exposing their brand, businesses want to grow their following as well.
As a result, you’re not only exposing your company to a wider audience, but you’re also getting more followers to organically grow your brand and you’re even tempting the audience with a sale. If you manage to take the top paid advertising spot and the top organic search ranking spot at the same time, then it’s going to make customers trust you even more than they normally would from seeing you at the top. While it can be time-consuming and expensive to merge your social media networking with paid advertising, it can pay off extremely well.
Conclusion
As you can see, networking is incredibly important for any business that wants to be relevant to their customers. Networking doesn’t have to mean just connecting with clients and investors–it can also mean speaking to customers and getting feedback from them about your latest products and services, and how you can improve them. While the customer usually isn’t always right, they (probably) use your products more often than you and they know all of the flaws and issues that come with it.
