Three Tried and True Ways to Build Real Connections Online

Since social media has taken off, there has been a stigma surrounding it that it prevents or does not produce real connections. While that can be true, it is all about how you use it. If you spend all day posting about whatever you care about, never considering your audience, never talking to them, and pretending it's your world and we are just living in it OF COURSE it will be hard to make real connections. The same goes for in-person networking, it takes two engaged people to have a meaningful, productive conversation. There are three basic steps you can use to avoid this bottleneck. Keep reading to find out. 1. Find Your People For your content to make an impact, it must be served to the right audience. The best strategy is to reflect on what your goals are. What are you trying to do? Why? And who for? Then really delve down into this and find your niche. The more specific, the better! Then, target these folks. Targeting can be done in a variety of paid or organic ways. You can create ad campaigns and choose an audience persona. Or you can follow these folks, like their pages, and join groups where they are active. Even better, do both! Just make sure you are showing up where they already are. 2. Be Social This one may seem like a no-brainer, but it can be hard. Talking to strangers can seem awkward. Find something you like about their page and compliment them in the comments, like their posts, send them content they would find interesting (bonus points if it is content created by you), and all that jazz. Basically, build common ground and warm these people up before you try and cold pitch them. A cold pitch is a random message from someone you can never meet about something you weren't expecting. These are not successful. Warm these folks up, build a relationship, and then go for it! 3.Help Them Once you reach out to these folks with a private message, find out more about them. Ask questions like how is their buisness going (if you are B2B) or if they have ever struggled with something your product solves (B2C). By doing this you are identifying their pain points. You may already know these if you did great audience research. But once you know what these are, give them your solution. Illustrate how whatever it is you are offering can solve all their problems! Not in a cheesy or degrading way, but in a personable, relatable tone. Worst case scenario, they aren't ready to make the leap and you make sure to keep the door open by continued engagement and nurturing the bond you developed in step 2! Want help applying these steps and being more specific to your buisness plan? Please reach out to us! We are more than happy to help!