You have to be everywhere online in order to achieve local dominance within your market. Actually, that's a general statement for any industry, not just jewelry. What it means is that there is no single, all-powerful website or social network for everyone. Every one of us has unique taste and needs and therefore no single website works for everyone, although Facebook certainly thinks they do.
Twitter is for noise-making. Facebook can be used for friends, family or business. MySpace has even more noise than Twitter. CafeMom is for moms-to-be. Classmates is the place to connect with school friends. There are hundreds of others and you can find a great list on Wikipedia by searching for "List of social networking websites" if you are really interested.
Your customers will come from everywhere, and that's why you need to at least create a personal and business profile in as many social media sites as possible.
Let's take a look at this short list we scraped from Wikipedia:
1. Facebook: 500,000,000 users worldwide. Users 13 years old and up.
2. Twitter: 175,000,000 users worldwide. Any age.
3. MySpace: 130,000,000 users worldwide. Any age.
4. LinkedIn: 80,000,000 users worldwide. Users 18 years old and up.
These are the top 4 that we see for both the USA and worldwide. There are others with more than 100,000,000 users but they have focused users in other countries.
For business use, we've abandoned MySpace since early 2009. Although you know Facebook and Twitter are currently the place to be for business promotions, you need to also consider LinkedIn.
LinkedIn's primary mission is to connect you to other business professionals that you work with. At first thought, you might assume this means connecting with your banker, lawyer, ad agent, etc. And that's quite true, and certainly an easy way to get started.
However, let's think about this for a moment and bring into focus the type of repeat customers that come into your store. Are any of them business professionals working at a desk and a computer during the day? Certainly! With 80 million members, you can also be guaranteed that many of your customers also have LinkedIn accounts.
Throughout this week, we're going to give you some strategies to build your own LinkedIn account and use it to connect with your customers.
To get started, navigate yourself over to linkedin.com and create an account. The steps should be intuitive and there's even a little thermometer that tells you what percentage of your profile is completed.
Enter in your different trade educations, as well as college. Also, enter the various places you've worked. You could also have multiple entries for the same place of employment if you had different job titles.
For today, just create your profile and leave all the summary and long description fields blank for now. We will give you specific strategies for each starting tomorrow. Also don't request connections with anyone yet until your profile is at least 70% complete.
Tomorrow's Nugget will explain good and bad strategies for filling in the descriptions of your past and current jobs.
