(Tip: It Will Help You Book Gigs)
As a professional speaker, you live and die by your ability to convince people that they want to listen to you. You do that by showing them you have something interesting, unique and valuable to say. The introduction of social networking and communities, has opened up a whole new frontier to speaking professionals. They are the perfect tool for demonstrating your value, by allowing you to present unique, interesting and perhaps amusing material on a regular basis. It also allows you to engage your potential clients in dialogue, which is a great way to build connections and develop trust based relationships. These relationships lead to bookings. When entering into the world of social communities, there are five key steps to follow.
Step 1 – Select the right community platform for you and your target audience.
There are several different main stream online social communities, that are easy to set up and engage in. However, each really addresses a different type of user and by extension will address a different type of potential client base. As a quick primer, consider the following.
- Facebook - Allows for rich and dynamic conversation and easy community building. Participants have the opportunity to not only engage with you, but also with each other. This community is valuable if you are targeting a client base that is very relationship focused.
- Twitter – This networking application, allows you to push interesting information to your potential clients. They can communicate with you as well, but it is not a tool that allows for deep conversations or multiple users cross conversing. This community is a good place for building a client base that thrives on information and wants lots of tidbits on a regular basis.
- NING – NING has some great features for developing a very dynamic social community. You can design your entire community to perform as your primary website would, by not only having space for postings, but also allowing you to include longer formatted articles, embedded video etc. The downside of NING is that it is social community, that you completely create from scratch. It does not offer the same capacity to collect users who are just hanging out on the application, like Facebook does. On the other hand if you are targeting potential clients who are information junkies, and thrive on multimedia presentation, this is the place for you.
Step 2 – Spend the time to create dynamic kick off content.
Ok, you have selected your home base for your social community. Once you have set up your profile, you are not ready to open the doors to potential clients yet. If you want to get, and more importantly keep, new potential clients interacting with your community, you need to set the stage. Make sure when those first users come to your site there is something for them to interact with. This will prevent them from feeling like the first ones who have shown up at the party.
Step 3 – Get some users to register.
- Now that you have selected the site, and prepared it for the rich dialogue to come, its time to go out and get some users. The biggest tip I can give you here, is that it is not the number of users you generate, it is the quality of users. You want to collect people who are actually potential clients. Here are a few things you can do to collect users.
- Send an invite to all of your current contacts.
- Post a link to your site on other like minded communities.
- Add a direct link to your community on your email signature and from your website.
Step 4 – Get the conversation started.
A great community, is defined by how interactive it is. To enhance the dialogue in your community, post questions instead of just posting content. Behave as if you are at a virtual cocktail hour. If you were mingling, you would seek out new people to talk to and engage them in conversation by asking them about themselves, and being interested in what they have to say. Do the same thing in your virtual community. Be an active host and seek out users and entice them to join the conversation, by asking them direct questions.
Step 5 – Drive contacts to your community
Finally, once you have the party up and going, its time to open up the doors and get as many people to join as possible. Here are a few quick tips to get people into the door.
- Put a direct link to your community on every piece of collateral you distribute in your presentations.
- Actively invite speaking participants to join your community, during your speeches.
- Put a poster up during your speeches that announces your community and offers a prize for people who signs up and join in the following week.
