Your Most Powerful Connections in Social Media – do you know who they are?

After you have been sharing your valuable content across many social media channels for a while, things start to happen. You start making connections with people interested in what you have to say, people who share your views, and others who engage with your business and maybe buy stuff from you eventually. Whilst you are using social media to engage with your potential customers you may also be networking offline too, by attending business networking breakfasts, lunches and evening events in order to generate connections that you hope will one day turn into business.

Eventually all this networking and social media activity pays off and business starts rolling in. Putting on the extra weight and creating all that valuable content paid off! However, have you ever stopped to think about who or what, in your network, are the most powerful and influential connections, those that bring you the most business, most opportunities for business, or the most exposure? Analysing your network, both online and offline, and working out who those people are, allows you to work out where you should be focusing most of your time and effort.

I am sure you have heard about the 80/20 rule, known as Pareto analysis, where 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers?

It makes sense to apply this to your social media and networking activity. By analysing your networks and connections, and considering, for each person in the network, what they have done for you by way of a referral, invite to an event, or business generated, you can find the 20% of the network that produces 80% of the results. Once you have that data to hand, you know where to focus your time and effort supporting those people, so that you can create a situation where business comes more reliably from your networking.

Whilst it can be time consuming going through every connection, especially if you have been networking online and offline for some time, it can pay dividends by:

• making your networking activities, both on and offline, far more productive
• showing you which networking groups to drop and which to spend more time with
• making it clear the social media sites that work for you
• helping you to make your networking time more effective.

So is online and offline networking working for you, and if so, who are your most influential connections and how much time are you spending with them?

Let me know in the comments below how networking and social media is working for you. I hope this helps.

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