Critical Points On Applying Social Networking To Improve Your Enterprise

Posted under Uncategorized by seolinkvine

Almost all of us have had some kind of mental block when we sit down and look at our Twitter account, wondering what on earth we should type into the “What’s Happening” box.

We’re all guilty of thinking too hard here. You need simply answer the question in front of you… Just ask yourself “what’s happening…?”

That’s right, you need no skill to master Twitter other than to be yourself. There are a huge variety of ways to market your business by using Twitter. In my business, I have come across a number of client projects associated with Twitter and have experimented and tinkered around with a number of different approaches and techniques, but there is one that I favour over all others.

I think that the best technique is not to have one, actually. I do have one piece of advice for you that I use when I am working on a new client intake and I’m going to show this to you live, so you can see it all as it happens in the video that accompanies this post.

I have discovered that nobody of value to your business will seriously listen to you or really interact with you, unless it is YOU. My main rule is that I need to do a number of “real” tweets by telling people what is actually “happening,” or re-tweeting a post that I have found elsewhere or something valuable that I discovered from a follower. At other times, I put some specific business tweets in and send some of my links out there. I try and keep these in perspective however and I never run the risk of boring people with too many business tweets. I find that (1 in 10 – 15) is about the right number.

So, to show you how I do this and what I feel is the best approach I’m going to go ahead and work on Twitter right now as I’m writing this and address the question – “What’s Happening?” This will be my Tweet:

“I’m composing an article about Twitter and I need you to do something for me — if you see this can you send me a tweet back? I will love you forever if you do!! Thank you!”

Because that’s exactly what’s happening right now. But to adapt this to your own VA business you can say..

1. “My VA practice is taking on new clients, is anybody aware of somebody who might need some help?”

2. “I’m sure there is somebody out there who could use an hour of complimentary administrative services?”

3. “I am writing an article on how to use a VA for your bookkeeping – what do you use a VA for?”

Can you see what I’m doing here – try this and you might get a few good leads as I did.

So, watch the video which comes with this post to “see my ACTUAL Seesmic Desktop application” with the video proof that this can truly work for you too.

It has been 20 Minutes now, and I am checking back to see how many real @reply responses I have got from my experiment – 20 minutes isn’t very long, but Twitter runs at a fast pace so it’s about right for this kind of tweet – (I received 16 in total, and you can see the real life example in the video – it’s not very clear on the upload to YouTube so I will place a screenshot below for you). I have also tweeted and said thank you to all of these people during this time, so my original tweet is very lost at the back now, so I would advise that you wait a little while and leave your tweet up, before tweeting your “Thank You’s.” I then went on to place them in a Twitter list, and because they are all wonderful, I have put them on my “Awesome Twitter Experiment” list. See part 2 of the video on how to put them in a list.

To sum it all up, you just need to be yourself, honest and straightforward. Twitter wasn’t originally designed for business – it’s the users who saw the loophole and made it that way, so rather than market your business directly, the vital key is to first market yourself as a person — then see if these people would be interested in what you do for a living, or if they know someone who might be. So whether you’re considering a virtual assistant program now, or you’re thinking about getting involved with a virtual assistant program in future, or even if you’ve already had some sort of virtual assistant program experience, drop by for a visit and see for yourself what other like-minded people have to say within the extraordinary field of Virtual Assistance!

In order for this to be really effective, you need a good following on Twitter and tomorrow I will be showing you the criteria I use when building followers, and I will also be busting a Twitter Myth!

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