by Silva Payne

Created on: March 20, 2010

Social networking has developed at a rapid pace in recent years. The ability to connect instantly with millions of people across the globe has attracted many kinds of entrepreneurs and marketers as well as individuals who just want someone to talk to. If you want to achieve success through the medium of social networking, there are a few steps you can take to increase your chances.

The first thing you must do is set your goal or target. You will only know that you have achieved success if you know what you wanted to attain in the first place. If your goal is to find some new friends in other countries, you may want to make a list of the locations that interest you. Then you can use that list to inform your search activities.

It could be that you have a product or a concept and you need some financial backing or a business partner to help you produce the item.  As long as you do not give too much away openly on-line about what your product or concept is, you can use social networking sites to develop links with other entrepreneurs looking for backers, and possibly investors and producers looking for a good business opportunity.

Using social networking sites to promote your own work as a writer can be a great way of building a fan-base before you are officially published. You can approach social networking in a similar way to the many thousands of musicians who use sites like MySpace and Twitter to promote gigs and give away samples of their work.  Set up a blog with samples of your writing, interact with your audience, and there is a chance that your writing could find its way to a publisher or agent.

To really know if you have achieved success through social networking, setting short-, medium- and long-term goals are a good idea. This allows you to monitor your progress, keep your vision relevant and flexible, and reassess your goals as you move forward. Having several levels of goals will also help you to stay motivated in your quest for success. It could be that you decide to increase your following on Twitter by 50% each month for a 12-month period. You may decide that you want to double your income on Helium from page views by this time next year.

For a long term goal, 5 years is probably far enough into the future for you to look. Keep your targets realistic, otherwise you will quickly lose your motivation when your milestones are not met on time. If you want to secure a book publishing deal in 5 years time, you may want to include a target of self-publishing one of your novels at around the 3-year mark, and then to really increase your promotion in the final 2 years of your plan.

For many people however, social networking is just about making new friends and relaxing. The volume of followers you have is not a true indication of your success on media such as Twitter. It is easy to build up a high number of followers by courting life coaches and anyone else trying to sell you something. Finding real people can present more of a challenge, but by just being yourself and keeping your presence a regularly-updated feature of other people’s lives, you can make some interesting and stimulating relationships with people you would not otherwise have met.

Achieving success on social networking sites is dependent on your definition of being successful. Only you can measure your own achievements.

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