How to reach your audience.

In every business practice you will have an audience that you need to reach or find, there are a number of ways to do this for traditional corporate activity- but there are also a number of ways to do this for online networking.

Lots of opportunities!
As we covered recently indirect networking is a great way to get in touch with those you want to connect with and is easily one of the more reliable methods. In many cases all it requires is an idea of the kind of things you're looking for.
For instance, in financial markets you can follow the Economist on Twitter and that will open up a whole range of potential financial connections.
But, this is rather a scattered approach as you would be waiting for some of their contacts to find you- whereas you could be using it to find them yourself. Searching through who's following them and who they are following would show clients of great potential, these in turn may have more clients you would want to connect with.

This can continue until you have literally thousands following your information.

You can also look for other well known blogs and information sources.
These are often full to the brim with like-minded eager individuals who want to share a particular kind of infomation. It's an incredibly effective way to get your name out there, in a positive light, not to mention share your views and personality with others. Guest posts are often available which could help to expand your audience in unexpected and greatly interesting ways.

Or you can use the good old fashioned method- market research.
In many cases, if you're a small local business this is probably the best way to target the best people for your organisation and will prove to get a lot more returns. This way you can (almost personally) know the people you're connected with.
Not to mention know they want what you're selling.

The aftermath
It's easy to follow lots of people and show that you're trying to get a great number of connections- but it doesn't show how much of this has actually been successful. Which is really your number one aim as an organisation.

Evaluating how well these things have gone is directly linked to what method you have used.
If you're using a rather scattered "friends of friends" approach it will be hard to say what has been done and what has come from it. This is because it's harder to track the individual things that you're actually doing and to track the clients that have or haven't responded.
In more direct cases it's easier to track the responses but it's a lot harder to get a lot of returns unless you've invested a great deal of time in connecting with them. So this might be more reliable but have a lower yield in comparison with other options.
Otherwise you simply have to use whichever options you have at your disposal to analyse what your efforts have brought, if anything.

Conclusion
In conclusion we can see that there are a few decent ways to connect with clients and a few different approaches. The approach will always fundamentally be the same- but the way it is used will not as there are many ways to skin a cat, as they say.

A rather short post today and one that I hope you have enjoyed- thank you for reading (as always)!

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