Do you know what Targeted Social Networking is? If you are a small business owner looking to market and grow your business in this ever competitive environment, you should!!

Why waste time, money and resources carpet marketing your prospects with costly “me too” newspaper ads, junk mailings and radio spots, when you can utilize precision guided internet marketing weapons to hone in on your target prospect and customer at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time. With budgets tight and competition growing, you need to identify your target prospect / customer and then go after them with speed, precision and an effective plan.

The goal of any business (brick and mortar, home-based or online) should be to identify and capture (with their permission) the contact information of potential prospects and customers and begin to establish a marketing dialogue with them. The problem is that most marketing efforts are centered upon the premise that a business throws out a general ad to announce their presence, or run a “special” and expect the prospect/customer to proactively respond. I am not saying that this did not work in the past and still does work to some degree, but responding to evolving changes in consumer habits on how they get their news, information, socialize, communicate and shop, you need to adapt your strategy or be washed over by the changing tide.

Targeted Social Networking

Every small business should have a core interactive web presence and internet marketing strategy to be competitive in this ever changing world.

To illustrate the power of Social Networking and the potential of Targeted Social Networking, with an effective Social Marketing Strategy, I ran a simple experiment to show you how a social network like Twitter can impact your marketing and success efforts in the future.

In my very basic test I used a Twitter site that I maintain which is geared towards sharing information and articles with dog and cat lovers. I have a website, blog and newsletter that links to this Twitter account (but use it mainly for training). For this test, I utilized a single Twitter tool to show how we can zero in on a specific region and prospect and performed the following experiment:

1. I ran a search on tweetadder to find everyone on Twitter within 25 miles of a random town in Massachusetts (using a zip code) that used the keywords “dog”, “cat” and “pet” in their bio or in recent tweets that they had sent. Within 2 minutes it gave me 915 potential followers.
2. I then automatically followed each one of them on Twitter and went to work on something else.
3. Within 2 days over 85% followed me back. That is 777 people within a 25 mile radius who I have now potentially targeted as pet owners or animal lovers who are following my Twitter site and tweets. Those who did not follow me after 3 days I unfollowed automatically, using the same tool, so that I did not mess up my “follower to followed” ratios (another important topic to cover).
4. I also automatically and immediately sent each new follower a direct message “DM” thanking them for following me, a link to special page on my website I set up for them to receive a thank you eBook about treats they could make at home for their dog or cat. It was a simple generic squeeze page with registration form that I tweaked in 10 minutes.
5. On the squeeze page I invited them to sign up for my eNewsletter (name and email address) to keep up to date on pet issues, specials that we might be offering and general news for dog and cat lovers. I also gave them the link to get their free eBook’s. Over 62% of my new followers hit the link to my site (481 visitors to my website….traffic and link energy) and 23% signed up for the newsletter by giving me their name and email address and clicking “Sign Me Up”.
6. My email automation system immediately sent them an email verifying their email address and also verifying that they wanted to receive my eNewsletter (double opt-in). This went on for 2 days until I came back and checked the results…
7. I captured 97 targeted connections that most likely were dog or cat owners, living within 25 miles of a specific community, who I could now email a newsletter, coupons, specials, pet news and establish communication with. That is 10.6% of my original list.
8. One last rule to mention. Do not do all of this work and then start spamming your connections with 200 tweets a day or 15 tweets at once. Never more than 1 tweet every 2-4 hours that are links to articles and stories they may find interesting and related to your site. Send out no more than 4 tweets a day about your business, and use a rotator tool (if available) so you can re-word your common message to go out every 6 hours, but set it and send it once. If you spam, overwhelm or generally annoy your follower, they will just hit the unfollow button and you lost a connection. Think quality and value not quantity in your tweets.

This project rook took less than 1 hour of time over 3 days.

The bottom line is that if I was opening a restaurant or other business and I could have gained 777 new followers who I could continue to communicate with on Twitter regarding my business, specials, etc and 97 targeted connections that I could communicate directly with for next to nothing, that is targeted marketing success. Simple leveraging automation and innovation to create new connections.