Hi everyone,
It's often been asked of me what did I do to build such a large gathering of friends here in Adland and elsewhere on other social networking sites, so I thought it might be nice to just share a few of my most common practices to build friends and contacts online.
No question that while on one hand having a large contact base is a true benefit to any marketer, on the other hand it can be a detriment. The more people you know (in particular the more marketers you know) the more you will be contacted with offers and deals and spam and personal messages and spam and more......
That's what it feels like some days.
The nice thing is when there is something I really want to share with a lot of people, because with my large friends lists I can get a rapid distribution of that info in a hurry..and those people pass the info out to their friends similarly, and so on.
Long ago I gave up on those quick little promo offers to my friends lists for the simple fact that those things NEVER work unless you have a large list of friends or contacts, so I would be doing most of my friends a disservice by representing that such and such an opportunity was really any good for them because they knew relatively few people and had really no readership or scope of contacts.
So here in Adland where I really got started in social networking I quickly found a way to get more people to join with me in friendship, and that was by making the offer. The nice thing about this Adland is that it presented a shortcut in accessing other members and that was through a tag in the upper bar called "
Reports"
I would regularly go through that list and invite every new member for that day or for that week, and I would also go through the most friendly and most active members lists and invite any who weren't already my friends.
That takes a lot of dedication to go through those lists, but that's how I did it here folks. In doing so I expanded my range and scope of contacts immensely.
On other social sites it's not quite that easy, but there are usually more than one way to accomplish things, and every site will have some way for you to communicate with new people and offer your request for friendship.
Along with that of course comes a certain responsibility, because I didn't gather so many people to me only to have wasted my time after chasing them all away by constant marketing to them at every opportunity. In fact now I rarely if ever share a link unless I truly believe that people will improve their success with it.
Another large list of socially acquired friends that I have is in FaceBook, but that site I've found to be a lot more work than in Adland, because although the ability is there to search out people, it's organized in a different manner, and there are limits on how many invites in a day that you can make, and limits (presently) on the total number of friends you can have (5000 in Facebook) Another thing is also that
FaceBook members aren't by any stretch all marketers, in fact my guess is that marketers are probably amongst the smaller minority of FaceBookers. So marketing messages there are often misunderstood and quite often reported as spam.
I found that participating in Groups that specifically allow members to become an "Admin" for a day to invite all the members of the group, was probably the quickest way to build a larger following, however your ability to contact them is limited, and in fact sending too many marketing messages will most likely get your account cancelled and you'll have to start from scratch.
Twitter also has become a VERY popular platform for building a large contacts list, however marketing messages are the norm on Twitter these day. You'll find the most successful "twitterers" refrain from overdoing it on blatant marketing messages, and many in fact simply offer some useful link to a blog post and let the quality of that message and subsequent links drive people to a desired marketing message.
Technorati,
Digg,
Stumbleupon, and the vast and growing number of Ning groups also provide an enormous selection of contacts for you to work with in your efforts.
Social Marketing is definitely a powerful way to get your marketing messages out to a lot of people, but the critical thing to remember is that Social Marketing is a LONG TERM strategy, and in the meantime you need to continue with your other marketing activities. Give yourself time to develop not only the contacts, but also your voice and a message that makes you stand out from the crowd in such a way that people don't see you as a "salesperson" but more as a provider of useful information and products.
I hope this discussion has been informative and useful to you. Feel free to leave me any comments and viewpoints.
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