Recipe: Meeting People Online
The Internet has created an abundance of new ways to network without leaving your home or office. In addition to the major social media sites, for any given market niche, you will find hundreds of online communities, blogs, and Web-based events dedicated to serving it. If it makes sense for your market niche and your preferred working style to network online, you will need to identify some online networking venues. As with live networking, you will get the most value from regular participation in one or two networks, rather than choosing a large number of networks and dropping in only occasionally.
Here are some of the many channels you might take advantage of to get more prospects or referral sources in your pipeline:
Social media networks. The best way to meet new people through social media is to begin by connecting with people you know. You can search for people by name or affiliation, or connect your address book to locate everyone you have an e-mail address for. Then expand your network by requesting to connect with second-degree contacts or friends of friends, as you might on LinkedIn or Facebook. Or follow others to encourage them to follow you back, as you might on Twitter or Google+.
Message boards and discussion groups. Membership organizations, media outlets, vendors, services like Google Groups and Yahoo! Groups, and social media networks like Facebook and LinkedIn all offer online discussion forums where participation is often free. You can read and post questions and comments on any topic related to the forum’s theme. Answering a posted question is an excellent way to attract prospects by demonstrating your expertise to a large number of people at once. Don’t promote your services directly (unless the forum encourages this). Instead, include a brief signature box with your reply that lets members know what you do and how to reach you; for example:
Breeze Carlile, Move Coordinator
It’s a Breeze ~ Moving Gracefully
San Francisco Bay Area ~ (415) 309-1860
Relocation & reorganization for households and estates
Web chats and webinars. These online discussions and presentations on specific themes are typically offered by membership organizations, educational institutions, vendors, and subject matter experts. Unlike discussion forums, these conversations take place in real time. Some are moderated or have a guest speaker who teaches a class or leads a discussion. Others consist of open conversation among all the participants. In live Web chats or Twitter chats, you interact by typing messages on your keyboard that others can see on their screen. In a webinar or Web conference, online visuals are combined with an audio presentation or discussion.
In either case, you can often connect privately with other participants during the conversation using an instant messaging or direct message option. This allows you to identify people in the chat environment that you would like to meet, then contact them directly to introduce yourself. Again, avoid being overly self-promotional. One appropriate approach is to offer another participant additional resources at no charge in answer to a question he or she asked.
Blogs. While publishing your own blog is primarily a writing and publicity tactic, reading and commenting on others’ blogs can be a powerful networking approach. When you comment on a blog post, you are making a connection with the author and all of her readers as well. The readers of many blogs become a strong virtual community, following each others’ comments as well as the opinions of the blog’s author. People reading your thoughts about the blog’s topic will become acquainted with your work, and may contact you directly to find out more. Many blog readers are also blog writers. So if your comments are valuable, you may find yourself being quoted or linked to by other blogs.