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Inbound Marketing Journal - Going Social!

By John McTigueFeb 13 /2009

Now that we have our Web site looking and working better, and we've started blogging regularly, it's time to go social!

As our friends at Hubspot always say, using social media for business is like attending a networking event (i.e. cocktail party) all day every day. Sounds good to me! No really, the idea is that you get two-way conversations going. You look people in the eye, and you exchange business cards. Then you get together later and do business.  You can't do that with any other marketing strategy (other than actually going to lots of cocktail parties). So our goal here is to get involved, chat up our blogs and get to know people. Hopefully the word will spread about what we're doing, and real customers will come to our site and sign up for consultations.

So what have we been doing?

  1. Signed up (a few months ago) at Facebook (yes, facebook), Linked-in, and Twitter. There are plenty of others, but we're learning here so we want to keep things relatively simple. We've done some research, and these seem to be the hottest and most business-prone (believe it or not).
  2. Started networking through these sites, adding friends at Facebook and Linked-in and following people at Twitter. We started with people we new (our own co-workers, family and friends). Then we joined professional groups, did some Twitter searches and followed people with similar business interests.
  3. Started chatting up our blog (the page you're reading). All of these sites have updates (what are you up to?), so you start by adding entries like "I've just added a new post to our blog,". Your friends and followers will hopefully see that and surf to your blog.
  4. Participate in other people's blogs. We add (hopefully) helpful comments and recommendations. If you think you can just invite everybody to your blog all the time, think again! It's all about exchanging valuable ideas and information. If people recognize that you're a reliable source, you're much more likely to attract a loyal following.
  5. Start measuring success! We're tracking the traffic to our blog through Google Analytics, the spread to other Web site pages, and the growth of friends and followers in  our social media sites.

NEXT - Blog 'til You Drop!

The Author

John McTigue
