Social networking promoter and Web-site optimizer Elmer Thomas last night urged dozens of local businesspeople and potential entrepreneurs to leap into social networking as a business-promotion technique, if they haven’t already.
In a talk titled “The Ins and Outs of Social Networking,” Thomas addressed a gathering of the Orange County business-boosting group OCTANe.
Thomas, who recently launched IER Solutions in Riverside, outlined these 13 variations on social networking, with tips on how to use each:
Linkedin
– It’s a great place to use wisdom of crowds. Ask questions and have a group of experts give you good answers to your questions.
– Network there virtually.
– Your business should form and promote groups there..
Facebook
– It used to be for college students, but now the average age is 30 to 40.
– It has more tools than Linkedin.
– As with Linkedin, businesses should form and promote events there.
Twitter
– It can provide almost instant feedback.
– It’s almost a big chat room.
– You can be in touch with thought leaders — journalists and people with influential blogs.
– It’s viral.
– It’s an effective promotional tool. “If I have blog post I want people to know about, I put it out on Twitter and next thing you know it shows up on another site and I have 1,000 of people coming to my blog.”
[Also see how "Inside Innovation" is using Twitter. You can follow me online at www.twitter.com/ColinStewart.]
Blogs
– Use Wordpress. It’s the best blog software.
– It provides live chat.
– Webinars too.
– Your CEO can give weekly talks to your community of customers through UStream.
Digg
– “I’m one of the top users. I’ve attracted over 340,000 unique visitors in months with such tools.”
– It’s a changing community that ebbs and flows.
– If you get to front page, that will get you 1,000 to 10,000 hits in an hour. “You end up getting covered with all of the big blogs.”
– It lets you see what people think is cool, what early adopters are interested in.
– Digg users like Top 10 lists and accounts of disasters.
StumbleUpon
— Use it to see what’s hot.
Del.icio.us
– It doesn’t give you a lot of traffic as the other ones do.
– It’s a great way to stay in touch with a community of people, using public bookmarking.
Audio podcasting
– It’s just plain cheap.
– Make sure to feed your podcast to iTunes.
– It gets you to people’s iPods when they’re struck in traffic.
YouTube
– A great place to put tutorials. Step-by-step demos can get the best traffic.
– You save money by using YouTube’s bandwidth instead of buying it yourself.
Flickr
– An online collection of photos
– “For me, it’s been more of a research tool. I find what people look like before I meet them.”
Docstoc.com
– A document-sharing site — a “Youtube for documents.”
– People can rate your document.
– Link to it from your Web page.
– Posting documents there is a good way to establish yourself as a guru in your area. With that aim in mind, Thomas posts Web- and business-related documents there. (To see the slides from his presentation, see “Ins and Outs of Social Networking” on his Docstoc page.)
How do you build up your network?
See more tips in Thomas’s blog, “Thinking Serious.”
