Building Business Relationships On Social Media

One of the things I find incredibly boring and old fashioned is a stuffy corporate or business culture.  When people want to build business relationships on the likes of LinkedIn and Twitter, are they more attractive when they show a real personality or when they go on and on about their success and expertise and repeatedly try to demonstrate it with their LinkedIn updates and comments?

I recently came across something on social media that left me exclaiming to myself, “Have a personality!  You’ve got to be personable on social media!”

If I’m going to do business with you, I want to know that you have a personality, not that you’re simply good at what you do.  Aside for my reputation as a professional, people seek my relationship help because of my personality and the relaxed, uplifting, sincere warm culture I provide at my practice and radiate via my communications.  If things were different, those people could easily look for someone they do “click with” and seek their help instead.

You needn’t demonstrate your expertise at every opportunity.  In fact, in can be better when you don’t.  Being personable is as important as being good at what you do.

Master the art of creating and maintaining highly successful relationships and you are more than half the way to success in business.  Customers and business associates do business with the people they have the most successful relationships with, often, over and above the businesses that offer the best or cheapest products.  We buy products and services from people and businesses that we like, trust, respect, get on well with and feel looked after by.

We live in a society where there is so much competition for our attention, from the media, from businesses including our competitors, from social media and from other online sources.  We are constantly bombarded with information and quickly make judgements about people and companies, products and services.  The important thing about this is that:

(a) we now need to work even harder to maintain client loyalty, to maintain a business presence in the world, and to attract more clients towards our businesses, and

(b) we can gain the competitive edge by giving people what human beings still want as the social creatures that we are – a real, warm connection to another human being, albeit just as and when required.  

So before your every tweet, or other social media update, contains nothing but a robotic sell, sell, sell message, infuse some personality into it.  People buy people first.  Put the person into the mix, not just the business objectives.