As first step, "stake your claim" on the site. Simply register and create a simple profile for your business. For your E-marketplace, you can create a basic a company profile on the site and also if you want a personal profile, whether you are an importer or exporter or local producer it is free to register and upload your products, services and information about your business.

In addition to "staking your claim", the site can help you maintain and build your E-marketplace's reputation and brand. Having a presence on social media sites is nothing like to having a listing in the Yellow Pages. It increases visibility and brand awareness and helps strengthen credibility. Businesses can accumulate "followers" on those pages (i.e. existing and potential customers). The key to "follower" development is structured participation some companies have developed over 6 million"followers" using regularly posts new information and updates. You can also create a "follower" list for your business by emailing your existing user-base to see if they want to be "followers".

Many Social sites, particularly blogs and forums, also can help you monitor and manage your online reputation. To help monitor your reputation, you can set up automatic alerts, to give you metrics and to notify you when your company is mentioned in a review, blog, forum or online publication. If you find negative feedback on a public online forum, you can respond in a courteous and professional manner. This shows others that you are a company that takes customer concerns seriously and actively addresses them.

For many E-marketplaces, your users are companies or organizations. It is essential to have a strong personal relationship with the individual persons within those companies or organizations who are responsible for choosing to use your products and services. Using our site can be a very cost effective and efficient way of building those personal one-on-one relationships. We are building the site around enhancing, engagement, connections, social interaction and discussion. Accordingly, you can build a more personal, non-threatening long-term relationship with those individuals. Let your employee's link with or become "friends" with your users and start engaging in friendly, casual conversations.

Our social site is not about hard selling techniques. However, participation in the site can help build your brand and reputation and certainly will attract new "followers", albeit, in a more "subtle" way. Post updates about your business, new functions or tools on your site, user comments, industry events, trade shows and other matters of interest. World Trade Leads can be used as a "showcase" for your company. One way to specifically attract new members is to "follow" somebody. The best practice is that you "follow" somebody who is following you. Therefore, become followers of those persons who would most likely be interested in using your company. Those persons might start following you, in return. If they don't, email them and ask them to. World Trade Leads allows you to spread the word about your E-marketplace, products and services and hopefully attract new customers. The best situation is if your social efforts become "viral".

In addition attracting new customers to your E-marketplace, the site can be a useful customer service channel for your existing users. Many of your existing users (or their employees) are undoubtedly using some sort of social media. For that reason, make life easier for them and let them link to your social profile so they can interact with you and see your updates when they're on the site. They'll also see you're up-to-date and keeping up with the current times. Interacting with your existing users on the site also can help you gain valuable customer insights, in a friendlier, non-transactional setting. Ask your followers what is most important to them, what extra products or services they may want, what functions they most need etc.

Although I have described the site as a "subtle" sales or marketing tool, World Trade Leads can still be a powerful tool for targeted promotion and marketing. Users on the site have fill out fairly detailed profiles about their companies and themselves which can then be used for demographic targeting of advertisements. You may be able to identify companies or persons on the site that have profiles matching with the target regions be it local, national or global or industries services by your company. You also can pay for advertisements on the site and add keywords and demographic criteria to target those companies or persons who are most likely to be interested in using your E-marketplace products or services.

Lastly, our site can be a fantastic catalyst for fresh thinking about new ideas. If you're not sure about a new business idea or about a change to your website, post the idea with a few groups or on the fresh idea section and solicit insight from others (provided you don't want to keep it confidential before launch). Get some ideas or feedback from others.