Time management an important aspect of marketing: Part III; Making time for social media -LinkedIn

When you begin to look closely at the time you spend and, which activities you devote that time to, you can then plan ways to market your business in areas that you may not have used before. A great way to build relationships if you are a business to business service business is through the social media. You can network with the people that would most likely be your target client or customer. It is very important that you network and take the time to do so. Remember the old cliché Rome was not built in a day and while social networking is not a quick fix it is a very effective one.

Here is a list of some of the social media networks that you can begin to use for marketing purposes with a suggestion or two on strategies and tactics for each one; first the list:

1. LinkedIn
2. Twitter
3. Face Book
4. ning

LinkedIn:

This is an excellent site for business networking and exchanging ideas. Make sure that your profile is completely filled out. The better people know you, i.e. the more detail you give about yourself, the more willing they will be to do business with you. You want to make sure that your profile is public. You want to be able to be found by anyone looking. You can choose who you connect with if you like but you want to be as accessible as possible.  Also, instead you listing your website as your company, give the hyperlink to your website the name of your business. In mine, I hyperlinked the words Small Business Marketing to my website so that there is and explanation of what I do right there in the hyperlink.

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Your profile is just a small part of your strategy for LinkedIn. You should find as many LinkedIn groups to join as is possible and relevant to your business goals. Once you are a member of a group be sure that you take some time to participate in the discussions. I suggest that you have the group email updates sent to your outlook. You can sort through them and if you see a topic that interests you follow that discussion. You can use the discussions on LinkedIn groups to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. I have been able to network with many people as the result of this process.

Here is where time management comes into play. You have to have the time to spend on doing these activities. It doesn’t have to be a lot of time. You can spend as little as a half hour a day with this process and you will find that you have expanded your network greatly. The important thing is to make this a part of your daily routine. Set a time aside in your outlook calendar for this activity every day. In subsequent posts I will show you strategies and tactics for the other social media networks.