LinkedIn is great – you can establish your personal and small business’ credentials (and brand names) from it. However, you do need other business social networks to expand your and your small business’ reach and gain some exposure. One of the business social networks I recommend you to join is Business Exchange, a creation of BusinessWeek (now Bloomberg BusinessWeek) or, in short, BX.
BX is a great place for you to share business-related articles (including your articles) and present them in front of business founders and professionals. While BX’s connection system is not as complicated as LinkedIn’s tiered system, it is powerful enough to follow updates from businessman and businesswoman you add into your network.
Since BX’s power lies in the ease of sharing articles, you need to develop a certain strategy and tactics to make the most of it.
BX great features
First thing first, you need to know how to do things with your article. Please read BX’s official blog regarding BX new features.
Secondly, BX can link to your LinkedIn profile, so if you have an established LinkedIn profile, link it to BX will only do good for you and your business – better exposure, more opportunities. In addition, you can link your profile with your active Twitter account, so you can have your shared articles and comments automatically posted to Twitter.
Sharing stories is easy – if you regularly visit Bloomberg.com and BusinessWeek.com, you can find a BX share button on each story to easily share articles you think interesting read – actually, you can share any articles you want, as long as they are related to business. You can also share your “reaction” (or comment) regarding any shared articles – if you link to your Twitter account, your reaction will be posted on your Twitter page.
If you can’t find the topic of your interest, you can suggest a topic to BX Moderator. And to ‘reward’ you for helping BX better, your suggested topic’s description will have a link to your BX profile page – nice exposure for you.
How to benefit from BX
From my experience as a BX member, here are some tips for you to maximise its impact to you, your small business and your websites:
- If you have a web or blog site, share your own articles on the right topics to get more exposure from laser-targeted audience
- BX can miss a business topic or two – you can suggest the topic to BX Moderator, and if yours accepted, the topic description will have a link to your BX profile – great exposure to your BX profile page.
- Optimise your BX profile page – try to complete every requested detail, even when it’s optional. I recommend you to add your sites on “Your Links” section; if you are interested in SEO/link building – those links will get dofollow backlink (my profile has a PageRank 5.)
- Be active in adding interesting articles – you might receive quite an attention (and reactions) from business founders.
- Just like in Twitter, adding someone in your network can trigger him/her to follow you, too – be selective in adding BX members to your network; make sure the BX members you follow is related to your topic of interest.
Are you a BX member? Let’s connect! Any testimonials to share? Please do so by commenting on this article.
Ivan Widjaya
BX Member