For Straight-Talk Tuesdays, I asked Natalie Kaminski of FinCode Solutions what sites she’d recommend to women starting out their business. Her list includes Savor the Success, The M3 Race, Women Entrepreneur and Tut.com, for positive thinking and inspirational quotes. As for her take on social networking sites:
“My all time favorite is LinkedIn. It is an amazing resource and a social media tool that helps you brand yourself. The key is not to become an “open networker” and befriend every person you see, but rather to create a true network of people that may be helpful to you and your business growth. Every time I get a new business card from someone, I search for them on LinkedIn and add them to my network. People don’t do business with companies people do business with people, so any entrepreneur must learn to become a good networker.
I also search for events on LinkedIn, participate in Questions/Answers, and belong to a number of groups that relate to my industry. Finally, a great way to create exposure to yourself is to ask for recommendations and become group administrator – it is free and creates an impression that you are the subject-matter expert.
As far as Twitter and Facebook, I believe these are not very good tools for businesses. The only reason I would recommend creating a Twitter account is to utilize the search function (filters) because it allows you to know what is going on before any search engine picks up the news.”
I personally do not use Facebook for business. Although I have work colleagues on my Facebook account, I view it as strictly personal. My LinkedIn account is particularly handy in helping me stay in touch with people on a career networking level. I haven’t thought of participating more actively on Questions/Answers, but I can see the value in doing that.
Natalie’s perspective on Twitter is particularly interesting to me. Having only had a Twitter account for a few months, I consider myself a relative newbie. I went through a phase of trying to grow my followers as quickly as possible. I implemented tools like Twollo and TweetLater, which supposedly would grow my followers by leaps and bounds. My perspective quickly changed when I realized that I was diluting the power of Twitter. Although I would not say that Twitter should not be the thrust of your business lead generation, its fulfilled its purpose of helping me build relationships over the Internet.
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