If you’re like the rest of us, this time of year means more faces, more handshakes, more phone calls and more opportunities to connect with a smile and goodwill wishes. If your staff generally does a poor job in these areas during the rest of the year, it’s a good time to easily instill some great networking habits that, if you’re diligent, may stay in place longer this time.
Here are a few ways to maximize those little, friendly moments:
- Add your social network handles to your business cards. If you don’t want to order new cards, carefully and legibly add at least one with a dependable pen. When you shake hands, point out that you’ve added that information for them.
- When your customer praises your work and wishes you “Merry Christmas,” remember to request that they leave you a positive review online. I suggest MerchantCircle, Yelp.com, InsiderPages.com, or your Google Places account. These reviews will hold heavy weight beginning right after the holidays, so ask!
- Casually mention that a happy client, or even a prospect, check out your Facebook business page and connect with you there. Encourage them to ‘like’ your page as well.
- Offer discounts or temporary specials exclusively for your social media connections, and disclose that information when a client or prospective client calls you for any reason.
- Add your connections to your Christmas cards.
- Find out if your customers are involved with a charity or helpful organization, and offer to let them write a guest post for your company blog, or offer to post pictures or write up a short paragraph about their efforts. Once done, these can be shared on your business Facebook page.
BTW, stop by Zero To Sixty Marketing on Facebook, we’d love to interact with you there – go ahead and ‘Like’ us while you’re at it!
You can also connect to me on Twitter by using the button to the right or @ZTSM to interact with the team. I look forward to connecting with you soon.
Did you find these suggestions helpful? Do you have more? Let me hear about it!
Great tips, Susan! I’m going to take a Sharpie pen to my business cards and add our @ZTSM twitter handle before heading out this afternoon.
One thing to keep in mind for Yelp … something I just learned yesterday: If the person offering the business review on Yelp isn’t already active on Yelp, the review goes into ‘filtered’ status. They’re trying to keep their database clean from those who would game the system, but unfortunately, it also knocks legitimate reviews off your listing until the reviewer gets active on the Yelp network.
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Thanks for stopping by, Shari, and sharing the latest Yelp changes, too.