Web 2.0 Mar­ket­ing Tip #19: Con­nect To In­flu­en­tial People

Re­gard­less of the niche and the plat­form be­ing used, there will al­ways be peo­ple who have gath­ered nu­mer­ous cus­tomers. When it comes to so­cial net­work­ing, this be­comes a more solid truth. In so­cial net­works like Face­book and Twit­ter, there will al­ways be peo­ple get­ting so much at­ten­­tion--the „hot shots,” so to speak.

These hot shots are mar­keters from your niche who stand out and, there­fore, have tens of thou­sands of fans on Face­book and fol­low­ers on Twit­ter. If you want your busi­ness to fur­ther de­velop, then it will be ben­e­fi­cial for you to as­so­ciate with these in­flu­en­tial. How­ever, you must be care­ful when search­ing for these suc­cess­ful and in­flu­en­tial per­son­al­i­ties; re­mem­ber that they are dif­fer­ent from movie stars and politi­cians who do have so­cial net­work­ing accounts.

To prop­erly iden­tify the im­por­tant peo­ple in your niche, you can do a quick re­search. Look at fo­rums and see who are cre­at­ing a buzz. When you are sure who to look for, you can then start search­ing for them on LinkedIn, Face­book, Twit­ter, and other so­cial net­works. Be­come friends with these peo­ple and then aim to so­licit their help in dis­crete ways. Maybe you can ask for their opin­ion about your prod­uct, soft­ware they are us­ing for their own busi­ness, and so on.

As we have pointed out in pre­vi­ous Web 2.0 mar­ket­ing tips, you have to make sure that you are not di­rectly pitch­ing to them. Rather, make them pay at­ten­tion to you by pro­vid­ing use­ful in­for­ma­tion and in­sight­ful com­men­tary. On Twit­ter, this might buy you an in­flu­en­tial re-tweet and in the bl­o­gos­phere, this might buy you a link to your site from a high-traf­fic blog. It can be tough to get a hold and con­nect with great peo­ple, but the re­sult is def­i­nitely worth it!

Also, what­ever you do, never try to spam the in­flu­en­tial peo­ple you con­tact. They prob­a­bly re­ceive hun­dreds of sim­i­lar pitches every day and have grown ac­cus­tomed to sim­ply ig­nor­ing them, so don’t ex­pect them to do dif­fer­ent for you. There­fore, you have to work hard and stand out from the crowd for them to give you at­ten­tion and assistance.