Social Networking -The Three Cs

Social networking does a great deal to enhance your professional and personal experience online. Personally, it allows you to connect with others easily. Professionally, it helps you to develop relationships. It is about creation, curation, and consumption. To tie in creation, curation, and consumption with social networking and online relationships, you create an online presence that is a reflection of your personality and your values. Once you have created your presence, you share it with others and continue to build new relationships as well as strengthen and maintain existing relationships. Once you have gotten that part of the equation to be exactly what you need it to be and you have confidence that everything is working well, you become the consumer (not only you, although you are one of the important players). You devour content that is shared with you and you continue to cultivate and enhance relationships with others that become stronger and stronger over time.

Social media is all about relationships—strengthening existing relationships, establishing new relationships, bringing relationships to new levels. The relationships that we share with others really help us to share information that we feel is valuable to others and that we feel will enhance the other person’s knowledge in some way. With the technology giving us the advantages that it has given us for some time now on a consistent basis, it has put us in a position to have much more control over what we do and how we form relationships.

Each time we start to establish a new relationship, we are in a position where we must share personal details with the other person. Many times, these are details that we probably would not share under other circumstances. As we reveal details about ourselves, we will also, in turn, learn interesting details about the other person. Those details will cause us to get closer to the other person. Once the foundation has been built and it continues to grow stronger and stronger, it will cause both sides to trust the other and credibility will be established.

The motivation behind the relationship

Social networking works because of people. They are at the heart of every aspect of successful interactions. What motivates us initially to build relationships may not turn out to be what actually sustains the relationships. That is not really important. The important thing is that the relationship is strong and mutually beneficial. In all meaningful relationships, both sides need to get something out of the interactions. If that is not the case, everything will fall apart and the relationship will not be able to be sustained. In your interactions with people, content is critical. The quality of the content and to what degree it will help other people is very important. It is just as important as the delivery of that content and the approach that you take to deliver that content. The better your approach is to other people, the more inclined they will be to interact with you.

Creation, curation, and consumption

The foundational aspects of social networking—creation, curation, and consumption (the 3 Cs), if executed properly, will carry you though and you will enjoy success in all of your relationships. If you create worthy content, content that other people feel they can use and that touches them in some way that they need, they will respond positively to you. The social media channels are successful and popular because of content. It isn’t about lengthy content (for example, Twitter only allows a 140-character maximum). It is about good-quality content. Now that we have been using social media for a few years, we have moved beyond the novelty of the initial concept and on to the next level of sophistication. Because of this, it is critical that business owners truly understand how to connect to their target audience in a way that really causes high-quality interactions. The content needs to be compelling and enticing and really helpful.

The idea that many people have not jumped on the social media bandwagon yet is moot. The fact is that a very high percentage of people nowadays do engage with social media. The issue now is how to get them to be excited about doing it more often. You have the power to make this happen.

Once you have created the content, you need to share it and it needs to be devoured by others. You want them to engage with you as often as possible. This is a good thing in many way. First, it drives traffic to your website or blog. Second, it creates relationships with people who will hopefully (eventually) become loyal customers.

Conclusion

In any aspect of business, if you don’t have a strong and proper foundation, everything will crumble eventually. The 3 Cs must be a part of that foundation. It is important to remember that you are doing all of this for others, all the while understanding that you will benefit from it as well. Social networking brings your relationships to a level that allows you and your business to grow tremendously. It enhances every aspect of your business, from branding to building customer loyalty to actually selling your products and/or services.