To drive home the need for every businessperson to develop stronger online habits, ASI Education speaker Amanda Johns Vaden led off her session at ASI Dallas with a quote: “We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it.”

Vaden, a business and sales coach from Southwestern Consulting, offered about 60 students a short course in drumming up leads and referrals in “Retire Your Rolodex: Use Social Media to Find Prospects and Grow Your Business.”

Her tips included using LinkedIn’s advanced “People Search” tools to create a list of new people to contact – from contacts you already have. “When you call them you say ‘We have a mutual friend.’ Then it’s not a sales call – it’s a friendly call,” said Vaden, adding, “Guys, if this does not excite you, sales may not be for you.”

Vaden also suggested promoting and thanking customers by sharing content about them directly to their Facebook timelines, versus just posting it to your own page. “It’s all about doing something nice for someone,” she said. “Make all those Facebook posts about others, not you.”

And since the average user spends four times as much time on Pinterest as Facebook, she told the class to “share cool stuff” and pin, re-pin and link all Pinterest content to Facebook, being sure to include a business website address on every pin, saying, “It’s all about the utter efficiency of it all.”