Choosing Online Networking Venues

There are any number of places that you can network online. New “social networking” sites are springing up each day, and they all have a little different focus.

Networking can benefit you in two ways:

1. By bringing you into contact with your prospective customers. This is the benefit most people want, and which they go after aggressively – often burning out in a fit of spamming.
2. By bringing you into association with your competitors and collaborators. This helps you develop greater expertise, gives you people to draw knowledge from, and helps you find people to work alongside. It is valuable, but only if you understand how to use it.

Most of the time, those two different groups of people do NOT hang out in the same places! So you have to choose a group or venue for the right reasons, and make sure it can deliver what you are looking for.

In order to network effectively, you have to consider two basic factors:

1. Where is your target market hanging out?
2. What kinds of networking are you comfortable with, and which ones allow you to market through your strengths?

You CAN learn to be comfortable with new types of marketing. But you’ll do best, especially to start with, if you build on your strengths first.

For example, if you write well, you have a lot of options. If you like to write on a schedule, a blog may work for you. If you don’t, it might not. If you want the freedom to write when you feel like it, article marketing (a cousin to online networking), or forum participation might work best.

If you like to feel plugged in, then networking communities with a lot of minute to minute action might be good – Twitter, blogging communities, etc.

If you want to build a network of friends, and if your target market haunts MySpace or FaceBook, they might work for you – but remember, these are primarily social, secondarily business, so they absolutely do not work for some kinds of businesses.

Ryze, Merchant Circle, or FastPitch might work for you if you like how they work, and if you can regularly check in and participate in forums or browse profiles for connections. They have a distinctly business focus, which works very well for B2B businesses.

One of the keys to choosing networking venues, is to choose things you enjoy doing. If you like it, you’ll do it more regularly. At the same time though, you MUST balance your day! You have to know when to read the posts, and when to skip them, and how to put business first when necessary.

Many venues offer chances for event participation. Choose the events by the same criteria – by whether your target market is likely to be there, and whether you can communicate effectively with them there.

Look for Trade Associations also – many have networking options available. Some of them do a better job of reaching CUSTOMERS, others do a better job of reaching associates. Each has its value, just make sure you are choosing it for the value that you want!

Don’t just join a bunch of groups – each takes time to set up a profile and make it work for you. You need to look them over and make sure they have a good chance of benefiting you, and chose those that will help you do so effectively. If they have a lot of fluff, and take a lot of your time, you’ll burn out. They need to be fairly efficient to use, and allow you good tools for doing what you need to do in a successful manner.

If you join a group, and it does not give you what you need, OR, you end up not using it, drop it. Otherwise it is dead weight. In order to make them work, you have to WORK them. Select carefully, between 2 and 10 venues, and then get to work.