Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

I have spent the past few weeks practically attached to my keyboard and my phone.  My primary goal right now is to get my coaching business revved up; producing quality work for me in coaching and making significant contributions to quality clients.  My Mastermind Group, along with several people in the know, including Sandra de Freitas (TechCoach), Hannah McNamara, Carrie Wilkerson and Bernadette Doyle, have persuaded me that social networking is the way to go. 

Everyone seems to want to be connected and to have news sent to them in little bytes or tweets or status updates 24 hours a day.  So, I have had my head down and registered for everything out there that I know, and then connected them up to each other. Since I am not "techie," this has taken me more time than I want to admit to you, but in the process, I have learned a few things.

• If you want to take a survey, make it professional looking and easy to deliver to potential respondents by taking an account with SurveyMonkey. A basic account is free, but you can upgrade to a professional account for $19.95 a month in order to have more options. You can check out my survey  as an example.

• If you are starting a small business, Nicola Bird of Fingertips Coaching has been moderating some excellent, free teleseminars on marketing with well-known guest speakers. 

• I may be the last person on earth to find out about Facebook. It's probably due to my skeptical resistance to anything that is overly hyped or ubiquitous, however, I am a new convert. I actually find it a good way to both "switch off" and be "switched on," depending upon where I am in my day. Through Facebook I have been able to:

  1. alert friends and family every time I post a blog here,
  2. find friends from high school and university that I haven't spoken to in years,
  3. update many people very quickly about what I am doing with myself, and
  4. find out what my professional and social Friends are doing.
• For those who want to more business contacts, LinkedIn seems to be almost wholly dedicated to business, rather than social, networking. You are encouraged to build a profile that emphasizes which companies you have worked for, what you are working on in your current business and what you want to achieve by being a member.

• This brings me to Twitter, which I have only joined this past week, at the suggestion of my fellow Mastermind Group members. Twitter seems to bring everything else together.  It takes small (140 characters) updates, as you link yourself both with Followers and those who you are Following. If someone seems interesting who is already in Twitter, you can follow them just by clicking on Follow under their name like I did with Barack Obama, or in some cases,  request an approval to follow them.  What's great for me is that Twitter updates my Facebook page for me, which can lead people to my blog and then my website and backwards.  Sandra TechCoach de Freitas  is a Twitter and Wordpress expert. Search her out even if you aren't a coach.

This might all seem like a lot of work, and it is at first, while you are trying to figure out what you want and need. However, it is amazing to be able to reach so many people without laboriously researching people and websites one by one, running expensive marketing campaigns and spending so much time constructing business relationships through leads and cold calls. And, if you are just idly musing about "where So and So ended up and what he is up to," you can have some fun while looking him up.

So, if you want to know what I am doing, you can find me here, on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Feel free to comment about any of my posts, by the way.