fixteas: Social Media First Steps

In the immortal words of Nike “Just Do It!” Take the plunge. You may not immediately go viral and be inundated with prospects. But, just like playing the lottery, unless you buy a ticket you are guaranteed not to win anything.

Where do I get started? What should I do?

I’m no guru, I’m a fairly intelligent business guy, So I’ll share what I’ve picked up along the way. Take it or leave it! There may be some diamonds buried in here somewhere.

Most of this stuff doesn’t cost a great deal of money. I do recommend some time saving tools that charge a small fee but I do so only because this will take up your most precious resource, your time!

If you want to make some quick money in your network marketing endeavor, any endeavor talk to your warm market first and foremost and then to their warm markets. Do this social media stuff concurrently but be extremely conscious of the time your spending and the rewards for it. It may take some time to pay dividends but I believe in time it will.

First Pick your platforms. I recommend Twitter as a way to build an audience and Facebook as a way of more meaningfully communicating with a smaller tighter knit group.

There are lots of other platforms you can integrate later on such as Youtube, Vimeo, Wordpress, Blogspot, Posterous, LinkedIn etc. etc… but first things first.

I will begin posting a series of articles over the coming days from Tom “Big Al” Schreiter, a fantastic Networking trainer, with advice on setting up Facebook pages.

What I’ll talk about first is Twitter as a potential prospecting tool.

If you haven’t got a twitter account yet, go set one up. Go to www.Twitter.com & pick relevant username. Maybe the same one as your natureline username??

Once you set up your account you should customize it. Upload a photo or a suitable image. Make sure you do this! Rightly or wrongly I tend to ignore users who leave the standard egg image up, I assume they can’t be bothered, not the demographic I’m pursuing.

Personalize your account; add your name, location, website address (I’d pick your blog or replicated site or the request a sample of FIX page) You can always change it whenever you want based on your current marketing message.

Add your bio. Put something relevant, catchy., intriguing, professional (or not) you may want to link to your website in your bio or cross promote to Facebook and or LinkedIn. You are limited to 160 characters. Use them all, your bio will take up more room on the page when people view it.

Shorten your website addresses or urls if your using them as they just take up more of your limited room. I use a website called http://bit.ly to do this. It’s FREE for a start. Plus it gives you some neat insights into how many people click your links. You'll be able to tell if you use different shortened links even for teh same destination how many click through from your bio vs a tweet vs a blog entry...

One final piece of advice in the setup process, I tend to uncheck the notices. If you are building a large following you may not want to receive notices every time someone new follows you. That can mean 500+ emails a day. Enough to, at the very least, clog up your email inbox and potentially shut it down for a day. If you want to receive notices you might want to set up a new gmail account with the same username you’ve used for your twitter feed (just a suggestion) this could be a good idea anyway especially if you sync it with the same username you’ve used for your natureline profile you can use it for everything. Keeps everything neat and organized.

Now your set up and ready to find an audience. Do you want to have 2000 people following every word you say? I can pretty well guarantee you that if you read and implement what I’m going to share with you next you will have that many followers certainly within a week or so. Sound cool?

Check out the next article

Cheers,

Mark Wright

+1 (604) 219-3610