The Business Cost of Social Networking

In the series of articles that you have seen on this site you’ve heard a lot about personal social networking. Personal social networking is a different activity then business networking. Business networking is a whole completely different monster because when you business network your presenting your business not just yourself. And it’s a viable cost of social networking. Any business that wants to survive needs o network with other businesses, it’s the way of the future.

Business networking differs from personal networking in that you are trying to get a specific business across. When your networking for your own personal gain you are networking for yourself, you are advertising and trying to sell yourself. Now that essentially what business social networking is however its different. Your networking and advertising a business. So you’re looking at getting the name of your business out there. You do this for many different reasons.

What are the reasons why one would do business networking. Business networking can help you in finding suppliers for your businesses or different prices for different things that need to be done. Business networking can especially and I mean especially find you new clientele. This should be the biggest reason is to find new clientele and customers. Hiring is done a lot through social networking as well. You can find some of the biggest and brightest name for your business through business social networking.

So now that we’ve established what is business social networking, and why a business may want to do this, let’s look at cost. The cost for networking your business on a social level can be very cheap or very expensive. First let’s talk about the expensive ways, I choose to do this so you can understand the most expensive ways first. Joining business associations are a big way of doing this. Joining something like “the webhosting association of America, etc” can cost a lot of money. The range of joining business associations can range from fifty dollars to hundreds of dollars. Now why would I do this? This adds some prestige to your business being part of a distinguished group. It also opens you up to conventions and other events that happen all through the year. I’ve made many a sale by attending conventions in this manner. There’s also another powerful way of doing this. Going to things such as the local chamber of commerce and small business associations. This costs a lot of money to do, thousands most of the time. However you get invited to special exclusive mixers and parties. This is the bread and butter of social networking, this is where you can make a lot of money because you’re dealing with people who obviously have money and many are looking for your service and hire from within. Now the cheaper ways of doing this? Going to free seminars and classes that people could be offering for your field, or by just hanging out in a coffee shop or places were professionals go. You wouldn’t believe how many cards you can hand out by doing this. So no matter how you do things, you can make money for your business simply by providing your card at special events.

Popularity: 2% [?]