Has Social Networking been of benefit to you?

[Corrosive]

Thanks Corrosive

I totally agree with what your saying, Im fairly new to new to Business Socail Networking so Ive been spending much more time on this recently, trying to learn as much as possible which can only benefit my business in the long run, so any sites/blogs which you think could help me with any advice/strategies would be much appreciated.

Thanks
Wayne
Inktelligence

Strategy is pretty straightforward to be honest.

• Keep content fresh and update regularly, write stuff that folks will want to read.
• Don't just self-promote, make it useful and relevant to your target customers.
• Shout about your new content wherever you can, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Buzz, forums etc.
• Make sure you are well represented across all directories and social media (this may help Bristol Web Design by Yoto Creative - Free online advertising for your business)
• Keep learning, understand your website and how visitors view it. Particularly use Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics. Make sure you set goals and review your site performance on a daily basis.
• Finally accept that all of this is bloody hard work!

Hope that helps.

[dedwardp]

Strategy is pretty straightforward to be honest.

• Keep content fresh and update regularly, write stuff that folks will want to read.
• Don't just self-promote, make it useful and relevant to your target customers.
• Shout about your new content wherever you can, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Buzz, forums etc.
• Make sure you are well represented across all directories and social media (this may help Bristol Web Design by Yoto Creative - Free online advertising for your business)
• Keep learning, understand your website and how visitors view it. Particularly use Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics. Make sure you set goals and review your site performance on a daily basis.
• Finally accept that all of this is bloody hard work!

Hope that helps.

Would you put the Twitter success down to including relevant hash tags as well? It's been a while since I've been able to write articles but I do them for all the same reasons you mentioned earlier, just without hash tags which might be silly for all I know!

[Corrosive]

Where we have found hashtags useful is if we are writing about a trending topic and you want a barrage of extra followers. See what is trending and if you can quickly write a piece about that topic. Then post it a few times, in different ways, with hashtags and watch your follower count go up.

The problem with this being that trending topics tend to be about the latest episode of Glee or the Beckham's new baby so not that relevant to either of our industries! I think we've only once been able to write quickly enough about a trending topic to get any 'juice' from it.

Getting yourself 'listed' is another good method. Find out who your localised tweet listers are. There are a few guys on twitter who have lists dedicated to business in the Bristol area. We follow them, they follow us and, hopefully, we end up on their lists of 'Bristol Tweeters to follow'.

Finally Twitter is great (along with an up-to-date XML sitemap of course) for getting fresh content crawled really quickly. In fact we can get new articles crawled and listed by Google in a couple of hours with a concerted effort (Twitter and Facebook) to get pages noticed.

Hope that helps your Twitter campaign a bit.

[dedwardp]

Where we have found hashtags useful is if we are writing about a trending topic and you want a barrage of extra followers. See what is trending and if you can quickly write a piece about that topic. Then post it a few times, in different ways, with hashtags and watch your follower count go up.

The problem with this being that trending topics tend to be about the latest episode of Glee or the Beckham's new baby so not that relevant to either of our industries! I think we've only once been able to write quickly enough about a trending topic to get any 'juice' from it.

Getting yourself 'listed' is another good method. Find out who your localised tweet listers are. There are a few guys on twitter who have lists dedicated to business in the Bristol area. We follow them, they follow us and, hopefully, we end up on their lists of 'Bristol Tweeters to follow'.

Finally Twitter is great (along with an up-to-date XML sitemap of course) for getting fresh content crawled really quickly. In fact we can get new articles crawled and listed by Google in a couple of hours with a concerted effort (Twitter and Facebook) to get pages noticed.

Hope that helps your Twitter campaign a bit.

Cheers mate; keep meaning to get back up to speed with articles and get everything up to date so I'll definitely bear this in mind when I, hopefully, get going on it asap

[Corrosive]

Cheers mate; keep meaning to get back up to speed with articles and get everything up to date so I'll definitely bear this in mind when I, hopefully, get going on it asap

It is hard to keep on top of, especially when you are busy. Writing content is really important to your website but it is one of the first things that suffers when you've been working for ten hours a day. We totally blitzed a load of content when we updated our website last year and it has paid dividends in Google (try Googling 'web designers in bristol' ... Front page baby, yeah ) but that leads to more work and the fresh content starts to suffer again. That client work vs own promotion cycle is a nightmare sometimes and I feel like this guy >>> :icon_Wall:

[Toppers]

Fantastic advice corosive.
I'm going to start using hash tags from now on our tweets.

Feel free to follow us and i'll return the favour!

[Corrosive]

Feel free to follow us and i'll return the favour!

We were following you anyway but thanks for following us as well.