Turn Strangers Into Friends and Advocates!

Social media is definitely here to stay in one form or another and most small business owners have no idea where to start their local social marketing experiment.

Fortunately, the methods and practice of social networking is not much different that what you have done for years, just a in a different forum!

Social Networking is a form of Internet Marketing, and should be a part of your overall business marketing strategy. The concept is simple… Turn Strangers into Friends, then turn those new Friends, into Advocates of Your Business!

Turning Strangers into Friends

Have you heard of social networks like Facebook, FourSquare, Classmates, or Ning? These are great places to get started in your search for local friends for your business! If I were starting from scratch, I would start with one of the easier sites to use, Facebook.

The easiest way to understand these social meeting places, is that they are just like trade shows, conferences or any other meeting place where you have the opportunity to meet new people and showcase your business.

Tips for Finding Business Friends on Facebook

• Make sure you have a “fan” page for your business
• Connect your fan page to your website and vice-versa
• Suggest existing friends “like” your business page
• If your competitors are on Facebook, look for mutual friends
• Search facebook for “local” groups or other “local” fan pages, and join them!
• Contribute to local discussions when helpful.
• Befriend all local media, weather forecasters, newspapers, etc

The best advice anyone can take away from social marketing, is that you need to understand nothing will change overnight!

Building a core group of local friends will take time and by spending just a few hours each week, before you know it you will have hundreds or thousands of targeted, local, and engaged friends in your social network!

Converting New Friends into Advocates of your Business

After you begin building your social friend network, it’s very important that you don’t alienate them into thinking its all about you! If you try to drive special offers, coupons or discounts in their face every day, they will not be a friend for long!

Tips for Effectively Engaging Your New Friends

• Make your reason for contact about THEM, not you
• Engage in interesting discussion every chance you get
• Don’t create special offers, just to create special offers!
• Give back 90% of what you want in return

Most Importantly – Any time you share a success with a social friend, ask them to share their experience with others in their own network of friends!