It could easily be considered a 21st century style gold rush.

People from far and wild claiming they’ve found ‘gold’ online in the form of income using social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and Linkedin.

Every new entrepreneur, online or offline business owner naturally is lured into using social media for free advertising for their business.

This stirs a gold rush style frenzy of people lining up to use social media sites to promote their business but is it all hype?

In all this hype there are important facts that seem to be unclear for a new entrepreneur or business owner;

How do you turn a friend or follower into a paying customer?

How much time daily should you spend promoting your business on social media sites?

Quick tips I have personally learnt using social media marketing;

Ask as many open ended questions to encourage conversations with you group. This will allow their friends to notice their conversations and want to participate.

Only spend 10% of your time promoting your products or services, spend the rest of the time providing valuable information to your readers. Providing valuable information will help convert a friend to a paying customer.

Create a definite split between your personal profiles and your business. This will help you share appropriate information with your family & friends and allow you to share business related information with a separate group.
Here is a video to explain the difference between a Facebook Fan Page and Profile.

There are lots of social media sites. Don’t try and spend time on ALL, select 2 or 3 and focus on these sites only. It will be too time consuming to manage your profiles on all.

Select this link for Seth Godin opinion on social networking.

(He must know what his talking about, he has over 122,000 fans on his Facebook page :o )

“Networking is always important when its real and its also a useless distraction when its fake”. Seth Godin.

What’s next? Where can you get the right strategy for your business and reduce the learning curve and time wasted?

I recommend any training led by Zoe deluca.
Zoe has a series called Social Media Short Cut. And specializes in social media training for business.

I met Zoe in November 2010, I believe Zoe can help you because Zoe created her own online business with limited funds, a full time job, her partner working interstate AND with a truck load of kids ( I think between Mark and Zoe they have 3 or 4 kids) purely by using social media. This picture L-R Zoe deLuca, Mark Wyatt and I.

For all you Aussies out there looking to learn from one of Australia’s real social media experts, Zoe is holding live training sessions in QLD and Sydney in July 2011.

Sydney Session
Secret Social Media Business
Where: Club Bondi Junction
When: 22nd of July 2011
Time: 10am to 12:30pm.
Select this link for further information

Select socialmediashortcut.com for further details for QLD session details.

I’m going to the Sydney session, so stay tuned I will summarized what I learnt and get back to you shortly after.

Be bold, take action.
Ally