At one of the VA forums I belong to a member asked if someone could explain how a small home transcription business can grow their business using Facebook, Linked-in or Twitter or is it more for the merchant business?

My answer was brief – there’s a lot to cover for each of these tools, but hopefully this will help answer it for others thinking the same thing.

Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter work quite differently but often with similar results.  I’ll try to explain briefly here:

Facebook helps give a ‘face’ to those you connect with, you can create Fan Pages for people to follow what you have to say and if you’re promoting a product, service or event, Facebook is a great way to be able to send out invitations to people to get involved and it’s permission based.  That means they’ve already connected to you so they’ve given you permission to send things to them via Facebook.

LinkedIn is probably the most professional of business networks I’ve seen – more business than ‘social’ although it is often lumped into the social networking category.  Strictly speaking you should only send invitations to people you know personally to join you, but once you’re involved with it you’ll often get invitations from others you don’t know. This is because they’re trying to build up their numbers.  There is a Q&A section there called Answers which is the best place to go – to ask questions and/or to answer them and get people to notice you exist. Their recommendations section is excellent for building up testimonials from peers and clients.

Twitter – Both Facebook and LinkedIn have adopted the small 140 character type set up – what are you doing now? function that works so well for Twitter (although Facebook allows you to have a lot more characters).
Twitter is about following people – anyone who interests you and having people follow you.  There’s no need to know them personally.  It’s a good way to ask questions, get answers and promoted products, services and events.

What is most important and many people forget this.  It’s more important to give than to get.  The more you give of yourself (information, assistance, just for the sake of helping someone) the more others will take an interest in you and what you do.

So with all three, and with any other networking type tool (even this forum for example) it’s important to build relationships and the best way to do that is be involved, be engaged, take notice of other people and when you are able, offer assistance.

Hope this helps.

We’ve recently had a very interesting discussion on the VA forum about the use of photos on websites and that then grew into a discussion on social networking.  Is SN good or bad? Is it necessary or time wasting?  Does it work?

And then recently on LinkedIn a question relating to the same thing was asked and I thought I’d share with you my response there and some of my response at the VA forum.

“Spam is probably the ‘worst’ part about it.  Geez people/spammers, get a life!  But apart from that I love the social side of connecting with people and learning about them.  I love meeting people that I might not have met during the normal course of my business day.

“Social networking takes me out of my office and into the world beyond literally.  I can tell you that I’ve been given opportunities I never would have had, if I hadn’t taken up social networking and it alone was responsible for my being asked to speak at a conference last June in Niagara Falls – I live in Australia.  So I’m a real advocate for social networking.

“I currently use Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin as my main tools which are added to existing tools of blogging, discussion forums, attending local networking events close to home and so on.”

Most of you know I spoke at the Forum on Virtual Assistance (FoVA) in June but might not realise that it came about because of a webinar I was giving last year on Linkedin for VAs to a US/Canadian audience.  They knew about me because of my involvement with forums and different networking tools like Linkedin.

Below is a partial copy of my response at the discussion on the VA forum:

“Many of us choose to use the new tools as they become available because we need to keep ahead of our clients.  I know that my own clients were the ones that drove me towards blogging, Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. I’ve tried several others too but decided that they weren’t worth pursuing. And my clients expect me to tell them about these tools and how to use them and what they could mean to their businesses.  It’s been through client demand that my own service provision has become what it is today.

“So, for those of us who want to use the Social networking tools, it’s a great fit! That doesn’t mean everyone has to or should.  It’s not about ‘having a case’ because it’s not about ‘for or against’.  It’s about what’s out there and what’s available and if people want to use those tools, then they can go ahead and do so.”

So, what do you think?  Good or bad?  Do you use Social Networking or don’t you and would you like to share why?