Send a Regular Newsletter to Your Social Network Contacts

By Joshua Waldman from Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies

Sending your contacts an interesting, valuable, and consistent newsletter can keep you top of mind and active in your network. When done tastefully and with care, these professional (and sometimes personal) e-mail blasts can reconnect old contacts and build stronger relationships. Plus sending a newsletter really doesn’t take much time or effort.

Don’t send a mass e-mail to your entire contact list from Outlook or any other e-mail client. Doing so may be considered spam from a legal standpoint (and that’s not a conversation you really want to have with a regulatory body). So always use an e-mail marketing client to manage large e-mail blasts. These companies ensure that your e-mail is delivered and complies with the most recent CAN-SPAM law.

How to set up your e-mail newsletter system

The MailChimp e-mail newsletter system is completely free to include up to 2,000 people from your contact list. Also the user interface is intuitive, and the newsletter templates are really nice. After you sign up for MailChimp, follow these steps to set up your e-mail newsletter system:

Set up your e-mail list by clicking on Lists from the top ribbon and then clicking on Create List.

Follow the on-screen instructions to set up your first list.
Import your list of contacts into MailChimp.

You can import contacts into MailChimp by linking your Gmail account, uploading a spreadsheet, or simply copying and pasting.
Start your first newsletter and choose how you want it to look.

MailChimp calls your newsletter, or any time you send out an e-mail, a campaign. It offers a wide variety of layouts and color schemes for your campaigns.
Send out your newsletter.

Keep on top of your newsletter by scheduling an hour each month (or quarter) to put together content to include in your newsletter.

Gather content to send to your social network contacts

The biggest reason most newsletters fail after the third issue is that the author fails to plan. Planning your content strategy is critical, and it gets easier (and more fun) as you do it. Following are some tricks to help make sure your newsletter remains a consistent part of your networking and your career:

Bookmark any interesting articles you think your contact list will enjoy. (If you’re using Delicious to keep track of websites you like, you can tag it with “newsletter.”) Later, when you’re writing content for your newsletter, just go to your bookmarked websites (or your Delicious account and search for “newsletter”) and attach them to your newsletter.
Link your personal blog (if you have one) with the newsletter by using MailChimp’s RSS tag. It automatically imports your most recent posts and populates your newsletter for you.
Keep a journal of your professional and personal news. Evernote is a good tool for journaling. When you’re ready to write your newsletter, look at your journal and pick out three interesting things that have happened to you recently.
Tell an ongoing story. You may tell an ongoing story of your job search and then continue with how your new job is going, or you may want to share in a professional learning experience or volunteer project for an organization.

Some people are passionate about a particular cause that has affected their life. If you participate in a cause and are active in it, why not keep your network updated with it?