Understanding Social Media and Learning How to Use it to Power Up your Business

Many of my local business clients say that they find social media hard to understand. They tell me they just can’t see how using social communities can get them more business.

I tell them that the key to using social media is just simple, really. The more effective your exposure is, faster YOU will be getting your results.

To really wrap your head around this, it helps to comprehend that behind the search rankings, dot coms and email addresses are people. Why are people online? Because they want to be informed, they want to be entertained, and they want to connect.

We market in newspapers, magazines, on radio, on television because we want to reach people who want or even need what we’re selling. The same thing goes for the web. Instead of using the traditional offline marketing strategies, we now have social media.

The biggest deal about social media is so big, we often don’t even see it. Sites like Facebook, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Delicious, Digg, Mixx, Twitter and all the others have one thing alike: they’ve redistributed power that used to stay in the hands of the few to the hands of  many.

When this happened, a lot of the barriers between us and our potential clients and prospect customers fell away, in a way that allows more communication between people, without leaving sensitive private information disclosed.

I can write a blog post about an aspect of what I do without exposing the secret formula that gets people to buy from me or hire me. And you can read it or provide feedback without divulging your private information. For example, if you send a Twitter link about my post, and my blog recognizes it, you can leave a comment without even telling me your email address, as you would need to do if you were to comment on my site.

And blogging and tweeting are just two types of social media you can leverage to benefit your business. Know that there many more!

For some people this is really scary.

Socializing online puts you in an odd position as a business person if you start maneuvering without quite “getting” it.

You don’t want to be the one who would unknowingly put his link on someone else’s Facebook profile and find it removed the next day, and have potentially powerful prospect clients blocking you because you breached some etiquette and somehow offended them.

You don’t want to be on a sales pitch too soon. You also don’t want to be the person who had an opportunity to promote themselves, but wasted it because of a moment’s hesitation.

I have heard of a person who couldn’t wrap his way around social media. Like in many new social situations, he didn’t know how to take action. If like him, you think you don’t “get” social media, and how it can be used for business, I think that if you’re like most people, you’re mistaken.

You already get Web 2.0 and Social Media. You just don’t grasp it. The very fact that you don’t want to “be that guy” means that you’ve figured out that there’s certain protocol to all these new tools, and that they vary from community to community.

Remember how you made sense of it offline? You found someone to help you, someone who had the results you wanted that you could copy, or you figured it out through trial and error.

Luckily, online there are people who are enthusiastic to teach you the tricks of the social media trade, so you can skip the trial and error. Now all you need to do is find the right people to teach you. Social media isn’t really that hard.

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