Nancy Wigal of the Search Engine Academy Washington DC keeps commenting about how shared interests make networking more effective. This post is for you, Nancy!
Effective follow up is one of the keys to successful networking. But creating and implementing a good follow up strategy can be difficult. I know. It’s something I’ve struggled with over the years. Fortunately, technology just handed me an amazing tool to make it easier.
Twitter.
Twitter as follow up? Am I crazy? Nope, used correctly, it’s a great tool. What’s one of the key elements of following up? Having a reason, perhaps? What better way to have a reason than to send on something of interest to people you know.
The trouble with that strategy is that the people in your network probably have a wide range of interests. How can you be an expert on and keep up with everything? The good news is you don’t have to. Someone on Twitter is interested in something you don’t know anything about. And they are doing the research for you.
For example, I have a client who is unemployed. I don’t have time to monitor job boards. But one of the people I follow is @MktgJobsDC. They regularly tweet marketing job opportunities, exactly what my client is looking for. So I send them on to her. It only takes me a minute, and I’m adding value to my client.
Blogs work well too, though they take a bit more time to follow than Twitter. I follow a legal blog. I’ve found some great posts to pass on, including one about Virginia offering an amnesty window for delinquent taxpayers. Just what one of my friends needed to know!
Obviously to make this work, you have to follow a variety of people. Don’t just stick to your industry. Broaden your horizon, and you’ll find tons of stuff to pass on. Hardly a day goes by now that I don’t forward at least one tweet or blog post.
So who do you follow who’s interesting? I’d love to follow them too. Always ready to learn new stuff.
Tags: Giving, Relationship building, social media
awwww…this is so nice of you!
And be sure to insert keywords, if possible, in your 140-character count, because Google and Bing are both indexing and ranking your tweets – so make a keyword-rich tweet every once in awhile to be found in organic search engine results!