Grow Your Social Network

Yesterday we published Twitter for Your Boss.  I thought I’d follow it up with more specific tools and techniques for growing your social network.  All the advice you’ll find herein is 100% whitehat/ethical.

If you’re using Twitter professionally and personally, check out our post on Taming Multiple Twitter Accounts.

Identify Potentials

Who would you like to network with?  In a professional context this is actually easy to define: customers, potential customers, or even people complaining about a competitor’s product.

Use Twitter’s search to find discussions that relate to you.  Reply to their tweets using @replies.  Don’t follow them immediately — if they follow after they see your @reply then it’s polite to follow back.

FriendFeed search is also incredibly useful for finding people.  It searches across multiple services — at the moment most of my hits are on Twitter and Delicious, but there’s also feeds outside those networks too.  This adds blogs and photo sharing services to the mix.

FriendFeed’s search will get more useful as more people use it, so it’s probably worth promoting the fact your company uses it!

Reciprocate your followers interest by retweeting their posts (when related to your business or interests).

Hang Out On Larger Networks

Go outside your network and join in the discussion in larger networks that relate to you.  If you’re a developer who uses Ruby on Rails, why not find popular Ruby users, Facebook pages and 37signals and check out their discussions?  If you’re a designer who specialises in blog templates, check out the Wordpress twitter.

All of these big names on social networks form hubs where you can find people who might be genuinely interested in your skills or simply conversation.

Build and Analyse with Directories and Tools

Twitter arguably has the best networking tools.  We’ve featured many on Quite Useful, from directories to “networking assistants”.

MrTweet helps analyse key influencers on your network and recommends relevant followers.

Twollo helps you automatically follow people with similar interests.  You could automatically follow people talking about your company, but this may feel too impersonal.

TweetBeep and Twilert will send emails based on a search term.  I use Twilert to get updates when people mention my company.

To read more about Twitter tools we’ve featured, check out our Delicious Twitter links.

Paid Advertising

Facebook allows you to advertise your group commercially.  This is potentially a good way of attracting new customers.  Facebook advertising isn’t used as heavily as Google Ads, so your competitors probably still aren’t on there.

Facebook’s demographic tools are also useful: if you can get people to your group’s page, you can get some useful stats.

Reach Outside Social Networks

If your blog is relatively popular, consider quoting interesting conversations from social networks on your blog.  It’ll make people who just read the feeds realise you’re active on social networks and join in.

Share your Facebook/LinkedIn groups on your blog, too.

Conclusion

The most rewarding technique for finding people on social networks in a professional context is through search:  Twitter and FriendFeed are currently the leaders.  Creating a Facebook page and publishing it on your blog is a good way to engage with existing customers.