Social Network Advertising Tips: Building Your LinkedIn Network to Get New Connections

Building Your LinkedIn Network to Get New Connections

LinkedIn has some useful tools to help you build your network, enabling you to find people and connect with them. LinkedIn informs you of mutual connections you have and categorises them as first, second or third degree contacts.

There is incredible value in not only mutual connections but also in second and third degree networks and where we may have problems keeping abreast with our first degree network, LinkedIn tracks all of these for us. This information is accessible and very powerful.

Your first degree connections are gathered by uploading your contacts from your various mail accounts and any other address books you have using the 'add connections' tab. Contacts in your address book that are LinkedIn users have a small blue icon with 'in' next to their name. Select these names and write a semi-personal message to them by adding a personal note to your invitation and replace the standard note with one that relates to how you know them. It is best not to be too personal if the note is going to several selected names.

While waiting for these people to accept your invitation you can add to your network by using the LinkedIn tool for retrieving colleagues and classmates. Select the people who are already members as they will be the most responsive to your invitation.

Since LinkedIn uses the information in your profile it is important that you have completed fully the section about companies you have worked for and schools, colleges and universities you have attended.

LinkedIn is a powerful tool that helps you add value to your network by finding new customers, partners, experts and suppliers. To find these various types of people LinkedIn offer several different ways but it is important that you have defined clearly your target groups. Once your target groups are defined then you can use the tools to help find them.

Your immediate network can be determined by browsing and visiting profiles. The connections on the right-hand side of the page, are names that LinkedIn suggest you may know. If you notice someone of interest invite them to connect.

Use LinkedIn's advanced search to find people you would like to connect with. As you do not know them you now need to check whether you have any mutual connections and if so, ask them for an introduction. People in your immediate network that you consider interesting and valuable to your network can be invited to connect directly.

Joining LinkedIn groups that your target market are in gives you opportunities to interact with others in the group. Joining in the conversation will increase your visibility and people will begin to contact you. Your searches for people can be saved within LinkedIn and alerts sent out. Email will be sent to you via LinkedIn with new prospects weekly or monthly.

By ensuring you receive updates and interactions you can see if there are any opportunities for you to build valuable relationships and when someone mentions an interesting person you can be quick to ask for an introduction.

My name is Tamara Baranova. I run TJConsulting and I help small business owners grow their business by delivering effective online marketing mentoring, support and training.

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What Is Social Networking?

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Social networking is the grouping of individuals into specific groups, like small rural communities or a neighborhood subdivision, if you will. Although social networking is possible in person, especially in the workplace, universities, and high schools, it is most popular online.

This is because unlike most high schools, colleges, or workplaces, the internet is filled with millions of individuals who are looking to meet other people, to gather and share first-hand information and experiences about cooking, golfing, gardening, developing friendships professional alliances, finding employment, business-to-business marketing and even groups sharing information about baking cookies to the Thrive Movement. The topics and interests are as varied and rich as the story of our universe.

As I'm sure you're aware, there are dangers associated with social networking including data theft and viruses, which are on the rise. The most prevalent danger though often involves online predators or individuals who claim to be someone that they are not. Although danger does exist with networking online, it also exists in the real world, too. Just like you're advised when meeting strangers at clubs and bars, school, or work -- you are also advised to proceed with caution online.

Once you are well informed and comfortable with your findings, you can begin your search from hundreds of networking communities to join. This can easily be done by performing a standard internet search. Your search will likely return a number of results, including MySpace, FriendWise, FriendFinder, Yahoo! 360, Facebook, Orkut, and Classmates.

Social network advertising is a term that is used to describe a form of Online advertising that focuses on social networking sites. One of the major benefits of advertising on a social networking site (facebook, myspace, friendster, bebo, orkut...and many others) is that advertisers can take advantage of the users demographic information and target their ads appropriately.

There are three major classifications of Social Network Advertising:

Direct Advertising that is based on your network of friends - This can be the most effective format but also causes the most controversy. An example is the Facebook beacon project.[5] Based on an action your friend has taken, you might see a message in your news feed saying 'Bob has just bought a 'RadioHead CD from MusicWorld'. This can be an extremely effective mode as often people make decisions to purchase something or do something based on their close group of friends. However, there is also a lot of controversy surrounding this as it can be considered exploiting the personal relationships you have with your friends and also raises privacy concerns.

Direct Advertising placed on your social networking site - This is a more traditional form of web advertising that is minimally effective. Just like you see banner ads on many other sites, this is a similar concept, except on a social networking site. You can see these - for example - as a brick in the top right of MySpace pages, or as a banner on the right of Facebook profiles and so on. There are two differences however - One is that these social networks can take advantage of demographic data on your profile and hence target the ad directly to you. Secondly, these types of ads can also be placed by individual developers on their application pages through ad networks. They have access to the same data and can generate income for application developers giving them further motivation to create apps and giving advertisers a more engaging way to reach out to these social networking users.

Indirect Advertising by creating 'groups' or 'pages' - This is an innovative marketing technique in which a company will create a 'page' or 'group' that users can choose to join. They will use this to build up 'subscribers' or 'fans' and use this to market a contest, a new product, or simply just to increase brand awareness. These groups can quickly grow in numbers of subscribers which can become a very effective marketing tool.

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