In traditional terms business networking is about walking around a room full of business men and women, swapping business cards and other wares and talking about what one another’s business works. More recently a wider view of today’s business networking has become focussed more now on social networking (a part of social media) which helps us all to create a good range of business contacts throughout our local, regional, national or even international community. Your business image whilst participating in social networking is of course crucial though don’t discount the traditional methods of networking just yet, they are important too and give your business a face no matter how few people may be attending.

Networking Successfully Online
Social networking in a successful manner is now vital to any small business for many reasons. Conducting yourself properly at an official business event or on a social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, business forums etc can be easy with a little guidance if you are currently unsure of how to present your business in these situations. Essentially these three we’ve mentioned are only the few to be found in the 100’s of the social media phenomenon, being the current major sites we are basing our experience on those but our advice is applicable to most online media of their kind.

We have put together this article and one that follows to help you conduct social networking and promote your business image in a positive way, we hope you can use our advice for your business be it blogs, social media, websites or other resources.

Using Social Networking for Business Relationships
Social networking has given us many trusted business relationships, products and services and with the whole thing exploding at the moment it’s a great time to get involved, your business will thank you in time. So how many active users do you think Facebook has at any one time? Millions, in fact recent figures from whyfacebook.com tells us that there are over 300 million users. Relationships do matter and becoming involved has been proven to give businesses additional exposure, in turn of course bringing new leads and potential customers.

If you have a good social networking manner and compose yourself well on these networking sites, you also give yourself chance to play around with extra marketing projects using some of your contacts as leads. Eventually you may build up such a list of friends and followers that you can select a small section of these to experiment your marketing skills with, promote a new product or simply stay in touch with latest industry news. Should this fail then you can move on to another section of your contacts or try a different marketing approach.

Goals
The aim on these websites is to promote your business in a less polished and less formal way. In fact it’s not even promotion at all. Not everyone wants to learn about how you increased profit by selling frog legs or anything else (!) now people expect to see a more laid back approach and want to know more about you or the people that work for you, so bearing this in mind go and introduce yourself, what your office is up to right now, who kissed the boss at the Christmas disco – or maybe not THAT personal but I hope by now you get the point, mixing more relaxed messages with others about your news or interesting info about the industry can give you the perfect balance – and the perfect amount of followers.

We cover a few more ideas on the next article ‘Social Networking and Business Success’