Friday, April 02, 2010

The Four Important Steps to Start Social Networking for Business

We have seen over the past few years the “buzz” was and is all about social networking say it on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn or…. the list goes on. Many other brands, retailers and corporate have also boarded the bandwagon to listen and respond to their consumers with the intent to increase the interaction and communication with them.

But, what are the main things the social networking depends on?

I have just tried to summarize the vast thing in under these four steps. This is just to provide the reader a hang of the buzz word.
  1. Listening: The first and the foremost thing is to know where your prospects or customers come together to share knowledge and interact. It hardly makes sense if you try to build your social networking setup at a place where you do not have your prospects. So, one needs to do extensive research and study to identify such platform as to where they are getting together. If this is not possible, then identify where is the communication relevant to your business is going on. In fact you want to be among with your peer group. You need to know the answers to these basic questions
    - Where do they live?
    - What do they do?
    - How are they currently using social media?
  2. Interaction: This is the ability of users to engage with each other and the business owner. The most important thing is a social network mainly depends most upon the quality of the interaction features and interaction between the peer groups. Without them, a social network’s growth becomes difficult, its membership becomes disengaged and its purpose is missed. Moreover, the quality of content that is being shared should be of interest and related to your business. Try to identify thought leaders in your business or organization that can submit good content regularly and can interact with the community. Do not try to talk more of sales here or more of me. You can build successful network if you share knowledge and this platform is not to advertise your business. Create distinctive content that fits with the organization’s identity and mission. The owner should make this as a part of the routine – create content, respond to members and engaging them.
  3. Relationship: The third important step is to build relationships with your prospects and customers. With proper interaction (step #2) one reaches to build on this step. This relationship should be such that it should trigger offline relationship and get-togethers. Here the member is more matured in the networking space and would like to increase his/her network may or may not be in the peer.
  4. Measurement: So your question now is “What is the ROI?” Lot of sharing content, exchange of opinions, reviews…etc is going on. So, would you like to see the no. of page views, referrals or sales conversions? I would suggest you to develop a set of objective-oriented measurement standards, tied to existing business objectives, to assess the effectiveness of the social networking initiatives. For any social media community, there is an unlimited scope of activity to measure: interactions, contributions and connections across time location and topic. You need to focus on relationships and not selling.

Building a good social networking for business is not that easy as mentioned here in four steps. It needs lots of thinking, detailed plan, strategies, identifying the peer group, getting hold of the contributors that can ignite interaction and engagements and the list goes on. But, these four steps will really help you in understanding what ground word is required. So, good luck.


Also read:
6 Tips To Be Successful In Social Media Marketing
5 Important Approaches for Social Networking for Companies

2 comments:

georgec said...

Please tell me how you would conduct Social Media conversations if your client is an automotive company. When you sell million of the same product, it can't be changed and customer service is handled by a dealer network, what should your goals be when all your follows are typically either your current customers, your dedalers, the press or your competition. Where can you take the conversation and more importantly what measure do you put against the resources or time, people etc to administer a social media platform.

Unknown said...

Aashish;
An insightful post with some excellent advice, especially the last section on ROI.
You and your readers might find the following post interesting, as it describes the Process we use to run our Social Media Marketing campaigns (SMM). Being a Process bigot, I like to break the same steps you highlighted into a more formal Process description which follows the Think, Plan, Do, Measure and Repeat philosophy of continuous process improvements. The link at the end of this comment is to an index of 4 posts describing:
1) How to Run a SMM Campaign. This is the formal Process description on how to run your campaigns. And because this process specification calls for one to measure ROI as one of the metrics to use in monitoring your campaign (as you suggested), the other 3 posts cover:
2) How to measure the ROI of your website as a whole
3) The 10 best free ROI calculators on the Web and
4), How to build your own ROI calculator so that you can measure the ROI of your SMM.

Here's the link: http://bit.ly/cEc0ln