Guide to Using Social Networking to Promote Your Services
Published in MarketingWith so many freelancers and design agencies out there, finding work can often be a major struggle, especially for those who are just getting started. A growing number of designers are using social media as a means of marketing their services, in addition to simply using it for interacting with friends. While social media marketing can be extremely effective, it can also be a big waste of time. In this post we’ll look at some tips that should help you to ensure that your time with social media is well spent.
1. Know What You Want to Accomplish
One of the most common mistakes that is made in social media marketing is not having a purpose or a goal. Many businesses and entrepreneurs recognize the power and potential of social media and social networking, so they feel that they need to be involved. However, simply having a Facebook fan page or a Twitter profile is not going to make a real difference.
Developing a social media marketing plan requires having a specific purpose or goal (if you’re using social networking only for fun or personal reasons then, of course, this does not apply). Web designers may want to use social media to find more clients, network with other professionals, or maybe to build links to their blog or portfolio site. The first step to using social media effectively is to have a clear understanding of what you want to accomplish. This will shape the approach that you take and the way you use the social media sites. Without having a goal or something that you want to accomplish, there is really no way to know if it is working for you and your business.
2. Market Passively
Users who are new to social media and motivated to use it to market their business will often make the mistake of marketing too aggressively. By nature, social media is all about people interacting with people, and when there is an obvious marketing initiative, many users can be turned off. Aggressive marketing is rarely successful for this reason.
In the case of a designer, an example of passive marketing would be the use of Twitter to communicate with other designers, and possibly with potential clients. Maybe the designer provides help or feedback to other users from time-to-time. Others may see this designer as being helpful and qualified, and when they are in need of services they may reach out to this designer.
3. Choose the Right Sites
There are hundreds, probably thousands, of social media and social networking sites out there. Of course, you cannot possibly use them all or even be active at a large number of them. It’s much more effective to have an active presence at just a few social media sites than to have a not-very-active profile at hundreds of social media sites.
The best approach is to decide on a small number of social media sites (maybe 2-4) that would be ideal for what you want to accomplish. For designers, Twitter is a great place to be active because almost every designer is on Twitter. If you’re hoping to use social media to promote posts on your design blog, niche sites like Design Bump and Design Float can provide a much more targeted audience (although significantly less traffic potential) than major social news sites.
Chose a few sites that work well for what you are trying to accomplish, and don’t worry about not being active at all of the other social media sites. Focus your social media efforts on the specific sites you are targeting so that you can have enough time there to make an impact.
4. Be a Consistent Part of the Community
Once you have chosen the specific sites that you want to target, make an effort to use them on a consistent basis. Social networking is one of those things that can easily get pushed to the back burner when you are busy, so if it is a priority in your marketing strategy, make sure that you have some time allocated for social networking on a regular basis (preferably every day, but at least several times per week).
Social media users are pretty good at picking out who is using the site to truly be a part of the community and who is using it strictly to market themselves or their business. If you become a consistent user that really becomes a part of the community, occasionally marketing your products or services will generally go over a lot better than if you are not a consistent user, and only participating when you want to market yourself.
5. Be Helpful and Approachable
The designers who are most effective at using social media to promote themselves have developed a reputation for being helpful and approachable. People often choose to do business with people that they like. Developing a good reputation and making some friends can go a long way towards improving your business through social media. Rather than using Twitter to always announce your availability for work you could take a few minutes to answer questions asked by other users.
6. Have a Blog
Social media and blogging often go hand in hand. A high percentage of social media users also have a blog, and a high percentage of bloggers also have some social media profiles. Having a blog allows you to use social media for drawing traffic to your site and to build links as well. Blogs are also great for interacting and communicating with others.
Just like you need to have a purpose for your activity on social media sites, you also need to have a purpose for your blog. Are you using the blog to attract visitors who may be potential clients? Are you using it to connect with other designers and developers? Do you want to use the blog to increase your profile in the industry? Do you want to use the blog to supplement your income (such as ad revenue or template/theme sales)? The purpose of your blog will determine the types of content that you publish.
7. Share Your Work
If you are hoping to pick up new clients or to increase the awareness of your work through social networking, you may want to share your work. If you’ve just finished a client project that you’re really proud of, consider sharing a link on Twitter, Facebook, or whatever sites you are using. Showing your work (assuming it is quality) can help to put yourself in the minds of those who may be looking for a designer.
Although it can be helpful and productive to share your work, it also goes back to the issue of being an active, consistent user. If you’re only using social media to showcase your work and not interacting with users in other ways, it is unlikely to be very effective. However, if you’re an active user who has developed a strong reputation and you’re occasionally sharing your work and looking for feedback from other users, it can be much more effective.
8. Link to Your Portfolio and Blog from Your Social Profiles
Almost every social media site will provide you with a profile page that allows you to link to your own URL. Doing so will not send floods of traffic to your site, but it will make it easier for other users of the social media site to track you down or just to learn more about what you do. People who do not know you may come across your social profile and click through to your blog or your portfolio site, and this may even lead to new clients.
9. Integrate Social Media into Your Blog
Having a blog also provides a lot of opportunities to cross-promote your social media profiles and to improve interaction with blog readers. There are plenty of ways to display recent tweets on your blog, to integrate your Facebook profile, or to encourage social media votes with voting buttons or widgets. Among design blogs, buttons for niche sites like Design Bump are common, and re-tweet buttons are also very common now on just about any type of blog.
By integrating social media into your blog you can increase the number of people who are following you or interacting with you via social media, which of course can increase the impact that you are having with social media. Ideally, you’ll want to use social media sites that a high percentage of your blog readers are also using so that there is maximum opportunity for people to connect with you.
10. Focus on Depth of Relationships Rather than Numbers of Friends or Followers
When using social media it’s easy to get caught up in numbers of followers, fans, or friends. In reality, those numbers will not have nearly as much to do in determining your success with social media marketing as compared to the depth and quality of the relationships that you make. Having a high follower count on Twitter doesn’t necessarily mean that you are able to convert those followers into anything meaningful for your business. On the opposite end of the spectrum you could have a much smaller number of followers and still have a greater impact if you are developing real relationships with them and landing new clients as a result.
While numbers can be indicative of impact, that is not always the case. Rather than going after high numbers, make an effort to actually develop something meaningful by getting to know other users. A few solid contacts that come out of social media and networking will make it very much worth your time.
11. Take Advantage of Available Resources
There are plenty of resources available that have been created for the purpose of improving your experience with social networking. Twitter in particular has a huge number of of resources and apps that work with the API. Free options like TweetDeck and Hootsuite can easily save time in your use of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. There are also apps and software that you can buy for specific purposes, but in most cases the free options are pretty good.
By finding an app that will help you to make more efficient use of your time you can easily have a bigger impact and grow your network without the need to spend more time on social media sites. Since several great free resources are available there is really no reason to not take advantage of them.
12. Have a Long-Term Focus
If your goal with social media is to pick up a new client quickly because you’re in need of work, it’s probably not the most effective way to meet those needs. The best way to use social media for the purposes of marketing yourself and your services is to take a long-term approach. Building a strong profile and network on sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn can take a considerable amount of time, which lends itself to being more valuable in the long-term view.
With a proper long-term perspective, social media can tremendously help to improve your exposure in the industry and provide opportunities for getting to know others. At this point when you have established yourself and your social media profile, it is likely that more work will find you and you may not even need to use social media to actively market yourself.
13. Don’t Allow it to Consume Your Time
Although social media can be a great thing for designers (or other professionals for that matter), it can also be a serious waste of time if it’s not kept under control. It’s easy to lose track of how much time you are spending on social media sites, so be sure that your social media efforts are not hampering your ability to perform services for clients or to run your business.
What’s Your Experience?
Are you a social media user? If so, do you have any advice for using social media to promote yourself?
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32 Responses
Thank you very much !!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hook me up !
All right ?
Jg
Thanks for the heads-up on Design Float and such. Great article. In addition I would recommend Gary Vaynerchuk’s book called Crush It!
Great article — I think you’ve hit all the bases here.
I was just having this conversation with someone the other day. As you say, social networking is about communicating, so why not start communicating to the people/customers you already know? Find out what interests them, and provide them with that information.
In other words, concentrate on keeping in touch with the customers you already have, rather than try to reach out to new ones. If your current customers are happy with what you are tweeting or blogging, you are more likely to connect with new customers on this level too.
~Graham
Very helpful…and I like what Graham said too. It’s ‘social’ networking…so important to remember to socially interact. I think we’re seeing a resurgence in the importance of personal contact in the midst of globalization… Thanks for the ideas!
I like your post. You’re right regarding the aggressive marketing on social sites. Sometimes I realize I too may tend to end up overly advertising my web business and constantly have been trying to change my strategy and approach.
Some of the best advice on social marketing I have found.
So nice this list…really good points for every designers. Thanks for the ideas!
I find social media to be extremely helpful for my business. It currently is the only method I use to advertise my services on my college campus. Make everything as easy to find as possible. Make the most important info the easiest to find. Start with your friends, it’ll make things so much easier.
This is how social networking works, a brazilian friend here in Marbella in Southern Spain recomended this article. It’s just after midnight here, and I have enjoyed reading your blog. I am glad that I came acrross it, very informative indeed.
Un abrazo
Vincent
I have recently put up a facebook page. Before doing it I only had about 2 months experience, and customers were mainly family or close friends. After I opened it , I started receiving more work, this helped me gain more experience, as for every job i kept improving. It also helped other people find and know about me.
In my opinion, social networks are becoming a must for business and marketers, this is due to the fact that mostly every Internet user is currently subscribed to 1 or even 2, mainly facebook and twitter, also using them frequently.
Great articles.., need a hard work to do those method.
Tried using twitter to promote my site…but I found out there are a lot of spammers there…I have 100 followers and I have never had 1 click!
Hello,
There are some great tips there….
I like the idea of social media marketing and this is because I know it works! My online business has grown due to me interacting online with people looking for I have to offer.
Twitter is a fantastic way to get targetted trafttic ad its also a great way to build a brand… but I have found the slower you build your list the better the list
Regards
Jeff
This is an great article!
thank you, so much.
You have good tips in your article.For sure, social networking do help a lot especially for those who start a business.
Good stuff here. It is important to remember to go into social media with a time commitment in mind. It is a powerful resource if you are committed. Good tip to market passively and to have a blog.
Thanks for the comprehensive overview – time to put the plans into action now.
Whenever I see a new person on Twitter that starts forcing their brand down my neck it turns me off instantly….as do those people that follow thousands of people expecting every single one of them to follow back out of principle!
Its not all about numbers – quality counts for a lot more…quality of your content & the quality of the users that you have reading it.
Great article – thanks
The advice about choosing the right social media outlets is very sound. You may be tempted to join, or receive invitations to, literally hundreds of different networks, but only choose the ones you feel you will be happy using often. Also, if you don’t already do so, share your work with sites that accept submissions or allow the creation of profiles or portfolios (including ours!).
I love this post ….. I think this is good post for all of us bescuase today new centuary is very advance i think we should have to go social networking
Love the essential list — Great advice –
We sing an identical song of do’s and don’ts to clients about social media marketing practices on an almost weekly basis — And there is one point that often gets gets muddled in the details — That being about aggressive marketing tactics –
While anyone at Pulledin would agree that constantly hammering away with aggressive marketing pitches is not an effective way of community building — We’d have to ask what the “value” of the brand using such tactics was.
Users have to offer value — something of interest … And in some cases that value can come in the form of streaming prices on products — Yes — There is room for marketing pitches, a steady stream of them actually, especially if the brand is built on offering discounts…. But then again — What is it that makes your brand identity an authority on discounts, etc.
Bottomline — People like deals, and social media users like following good information, especially, if it benefits them financially. They just have to trust it first.
Food for thought.
Thanks for another great article –
I think you danced around one of the most important points, while it all says the same thing… social media is meant to be interactive ! Its a two way street sharing of ideas.
A long thought out plan is not my approach for a social media strategy. The main goal for promoting services via social media should be to inform, entertain, and interact with your customers. Having an audience that listens to what your organization says on a daily basis is the most valuable form of advertising you can achieve.
The tools and best communication routes available today can drastically change within a 24 hour time period. Facebook is the strongest communication route to use right now because of the number of people that use the site and the average amount of time spent by that large number of people. Having a set plan can hinder your ability to act fast and capitalize.
I’ve had some amazing success by being creative, listening to my audience, and interacting with them in real time. I started a business called WeTeachFacebook (www.WeTeachFacebook) to help businesses maximize the marketing potential that social media provides.
Thanks for awakening us with such a wonderful and effective guide. I appreciate this
great article, i am using social networking sites,
Quite useful information for everyone to know: everything on social media is about the matter for it to be a success story!
This is great, but one detail i would like to know more on, would be once you have your site, your blogs and social networking sites setup, how do you get people to follow you, as if you have 0 followers and 0 friends(where you have just setup) then how do you initially get some people.
Darren,
When you’re getting started with nothing the best thing you can do is to just be active and get involved. Interact with other users and you’ll start to get some followers.
Nice article. Really interesting point you have made – “Social media users are pretty good at picking out who is using the site to truly be a part of the community and who is using it strictly to market themselves or their business. If you become a consistent user that really becomes a part of the community, occasionally marketing your products or services will generally go over a lot better than if you are not a consistent user, and only participating when you want to market yourself.”
It really struck home for me the stress you place on “passive marketing.” We’re all so used to being aggressive with the promotion of our products through the use of sales and commercials and ads, that we start to forget how effective being “helpful and approachable,” as you put it, really is. Excellent article. Thank you!