Building Your Network – And Keeping People Interested

Word of mouth marketing only works if you have people to talk to. This simple fact is someone given short shrift in word of mouth marketing advice today. How do you build your own network and keep people interested and involved? I have three recommendations: make it easy to join, make it worth their while, and once they get there, give people a reason to be in the network.

Make It Easy
If you have daily contact with your customers, you can easily ask them to tell their friends about your business. Other business owners look to create networks on social media sites like Linked In, Facebook, and Twitter. I’ve recently chatted with one kitchen store owner, Lisa Hartwick, who keeps a computer terminal at the register that customers can use to sign up for Hartwick’s Facebook fan page and Twitter feed.

Hartwick was posting flyers in her store advertising the social media sites, but an employee recommended that add the ease of using the computer terminal. She reports that many people log on and sign up while waiting for their purchases to be gift-wrapped or while they’re waiting for an employee to find a special order in the back of the store.

Make It Worth Their While
An incentive to join a network is always a good thing. I’ve seen examples of restaurants giving away free meals or salons giving away free haircuts to the 500th follower on Facebook or Twitter. This gives someone a nice surprise, and people get excited when someone they know gets mentioned on a Facebook page or Twitter feed.

Some business people take all new sign ups and do a random drawing to award a nice gift, such as an iPod, to new users. Another idea is to do a two-fer…if one of your ‘fans’ or ‘followers’ gets another person to sign up for your Facebook page or Twitter feed, both parties get a nice discount.

Make It Interesting
Once people are in your network, communicate with them and give them interesting information to share with their friends and family. One way to do this is to be somewhat controversial in your messages. And when I say controversial, I don’t mean to jump into debates on religion or politics. What I would suggest is take an aspect of your business and comment on it in a way that shows your point of view.

If people agree with you, they’re likely to respond. If they don’t agree with you, they’re also likely to respond. A realtor in Salt Lake City, Dave Robinson, told me that sometimes when he was just posting good things, he’d get a few posts here and there.

But one time he talked about something controversial: how a client that he was working with bought a home without using him after he had invested quite a bit of work, and he got a lot of people fired up…and got a lot of responses in the meantime. Dave says he tries to keep his posts mostly positive and enthusiastic, but tosses in something controversial every so often to stir up passion among his network.

These ideas are all fairly simple and require little effort to implement. Do you have any ideas to share on how to build your network? I’d love to hear them!

– Kim