Top 6 Business Relationship Social Media Tools

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Networking is certainly not new to business relationship building. The need for business relationships has been around as long as business transactions have taken place. The difference is now with social networking I can start relationships in minutes that typically took months or years before… if at all… anywhere in the world. Professionals and companies of all industries have adopted some sort of integration with social media. They use these tools in a variety of ways to promote themselves, ideas and products.

Highlighted below are some of the main social media relationship tools that I am personally having a tremendous amount of success with. Tying them to my specialized WordPress blog makes the whole concept cohesive.

Flock – The Social Web Browser is an easy way to stay on top of your social media contacts while surfing the web. I use it for my Facebook and twitter connections. It’s powered by Mozilla which I have grown to like with Firefox. Flock pulls all of your favorite people, places and content together in a convenient view and delivers a more personal experience of the web, where its users are more easily connected to what’s important to them. Tremendous tool for tracking your business networking.

Linkedin is arguably the most powerful business networking, career tool, out there. It’s focused and purposeful. You create a “profile” which becomes a resume on steroids. Linkedin Groups are a focus point for relationships. News, Events, Discussions, Comments, and Job offerings are tremendously useful resources of information. I share my articles and events in these groups which instantly promotes and relationships begin. Joining specific groups like opennetworker.com you can increase your connections exponentially. I now have over 3400+ connections.

With Twitter… tweeting inspiration, ideas, and thoughts can be extremely useful. Up to date company and product information is as well. One business idea that I use is taking the RSS feed of my main customers and tweeting them on twitter. Mitel, manufacturer my company represents, uses Twitter for sales engineering support. Power Twitter adds features to the Twitter Web interface including: inline YouTube, Flickr, TwitPic, Google Maps, song.ly, and all sorts of playable/viewable media; link expansion; link translation to page titles; search scoped to a specific user; status history peeking on mouseover; Facebook status updates; custom settings; @mentions of friends on profile pages; photo uploading; link shrinking; #dailyquestion.

Facebook and Facebook Pages can be a tremendous tool in opening events and articles to even more users. There are literally millions of people that only use facebook. Don’t underestimate this social networking venue (350 million users) and the power of a page.

Xobni is a tool I wrote about a few months ago. In my opinion it is a must have for Email, Twitter, Linkedin, Hoover, Skype integration. It’s easy, powerful, and I especially like the auto-calendar-date email appointment tool.

Biznik is an award-winning community of entrepreneurs and small businesses dedicated to helping each other succeed. The amount of sound, quality, business articles, groups-events, is outstanding. Biznik is for people who are building real businesses, not looking for their next job like Linkedin. This tool is a tremendous resource, social networking tool, for any business owner.

As I am becoming more proficient at using these new tools I am finding the power and purpose in them. They have become an integral component to my success online and my career locally as I am sure they will for you.

About the Author

Chris is a proven Sales Veteran that currently holds the positions of VP of Sales at DataTel Communications and President of Lottspace.com. Web Designer and established Sales Success Author. Dad

<Businesses are living breathing entities.

You are either feeding them or they die. Sales success is not any different. What new idea, new process, or new excitement have you brought to this venture? Is this your responsibility? Success is 100% your responsibility It is so easy to get wrapped up on the daily duties that there’s no planning, educating, motivating going on. I’ve talked about business/sales plans Setting Goals: 1-2-3 Sales Plan Success™ before. Taking this a step further… Have you looked at your market trends? What is your competition doing? Are you capable of directing – understanding how to keep up and excel? My industry is not any different. I talked about holistic selling Holistic Approach: 1-2-3 Technology Sales Success™ before it was popular to do so. Very few understood where I was going with this. Now we have virtualization of phone systems, location based integrations, and cloud based services. Our competition is not only from traditional players but now from search engine companies, etc... Presenting this to my sales team I found them terrified of the implications. They are going to have to re-think, re-learn and the hardest part… change. Unfortunately most won’t until too late. Over the years I have watched prosperous businesses and sales professionals fail because they simply could not keep their minds open to a changing world and market. They wanted to stick with “tried and true” processes that made them successful for years. I watched as a router/switch company became a phone system company and changed my industry overnight. Many couldn’t make the change to VoIP and are either dead or dying. Today those that are selling solely phone “appliances” and not services, (hosted, virtualized, cloud based) are going to find themselves behind the curve and possibly in trouble. My guess is this example can apply to pretty much any industry. A bit of advice Do you find yourself in this same predicament? Here’s a bit of advice… Do not change everything. But do change. Take some time to look around, investigate, and understand what is happening to your market. Educate and wrap your arms around this information. Put it into your newly developed business/sales plan and execute. Most importantly become an evangelist and an expert. You will most likely find your career and business less tedious and possibly gain back some of that mojo you had when you first started.

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<Businesses are living breathing entities.