Who You Are Should Define Your Social Networking Strategy
As you know, the Puppet and I have been studying different kinds of marketing for the book I'm writing,
You Hate to Market and What To Do About It.
Talking with small business owners, I've heard a lot of confusion and frustration about the new kind of Internet-based marketing called Social Networking.
While there's plenty of information about this category of marketing, many small business owners don't know which type of social networking is the best or appropriate for their type of business and clientele.
Is it LinkedIn? A blog? How about Meetup? Facebook? All of the above?
While every business person should have a full LinkedIn profile, the reality is if you use too many social networking marketing tools, you're unlikely to use all of them effectively. There's only so much time (and so much willingness) to market.
The marketing that works the best is the marketing you actually do. And the marketing you do is the marketing that fits with your personality.
If you know some things about yourself and how you like to work, you can pick the type of social networking that's congruent with your personality. Consider these questions:
How do you energize yourself? Are you an introvert energized by being alone, or an extravert energized being with people?
How do you make decisions? Do you take all the facts into consideration, and then come to a logical conclusion? If so, you're a Thinking type. If you take special circumstances and the feelings of the people involved, and make a decision based on those special circumstances and feelings, you're a Feeling type.
(Note: These questions are a highly-abbreviated version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test.
Take the complete test.)
Click here for Clarity to Business's recommendations on social networking based on whether you're an introverted thinking type, introverted feeling type, extraverted thinking type or extraverted feeling type. If one of these types of marketing appeals to you, I urge you to do it well.
These
recommendations aren't set in stone but rather a place to start looking for social networking tools that you will actually enjoy using and thus use.
