Part 1 of 3 in a Guest Blog Series

Greetings from your friendly Intergalactic Ambassador to the Printerverse™, Deborah Corn, hoping to steal a few minutes of your time to talk about social media. I’ll skip the reasons why you should be utilizing social channels to connect and engage with prospects, customers and fellow print pros. I’ll just assume you get it at this point, so we can move on to HOW to make that all happen!

It all starts with creating a community. This is commonly referred to as growing an audience of followers, but to me that’s indicative of a one-way conversation, and keeps a company at arms length from people seeking a connection. Since you can’t effectively grow relationships and share information if no one is on the other side, finding your people is the first step! And yes, you must find them, so they can find you!

I’ll start part one of this three-part series with two key social media channels, and introduce others in subsequent posts:

LinkedIn is where the professionals are. If you are in the B2B space, this is your hunting ground. A company with a page can see who their followers are and get basic data about them such as their seniority, company size, industry, and job function. That information alone helps you create an editorial calendar filled with blog topics relevant to the people already listening to you, and attract more.

Twitter is short, sweet and action-packed. Think of this channel as the movie trailer for your information. In 140 characters or less, you must entice people to read, click, share and in the best-case scenario, buy. Remember Twitter is a tool for creating relationships and no one wants to be in a relationship with someone who only talks about themselves, or is constantly selling something. For everything you share about you, share exponentially about the industry, and about your community.

Socialize Now…

Jump in feet-first to network and share with the print community at #PrintChat on Twitter every Wednesday from 4-5PM ET. The best and brightest from the print and integrated marketing community meet-up and tweet-up with an average of 1,000 tweets and 6 Million impressions per chat. Get all the details at www.printchat.printmediacentr.com.

Please post a comment, or find and connect with me in social streams!