Making Virtual Business Cards

Things are going digital that we cannot deny. From shopping to information gathering, now business cards have gone paperless as well. When one works in the social media circuit like we do, it’s only necessary for people to learn how to make virtual business cards of their own.

You might find it weird the first time you hear about these but they are really a “must have”. Just how can you create virtual business cards? There are lots of ways, actually. Here are some that I find really easy to do.

Via SMS

Cellphones have become a necessity ever since working on the go has gained popularity. Spare your pocket the extra weight of traditional business cards by sending and keeping business cards through your mobile phone. Services like Contxts and TextID allows you to send 140-character business cards via text. They may vary in usage protocols and charges, but they pretty much do the same thing, which is to send and receive business cards via text messages.

Via Email

You may think that emailing your contact information is easier than handing out business cards, but why bother going through the hassles of emailing them manually when services like Dropcard and WeaveMet allow you to automatically send out virtual business cards by sending a command to the service’s respective numbers?

Via social networks

Most often than not, business contacts you meet will check you out of popular search engines to see if information about you will come out. Usually, the pages that appear on the first page would be your social network profiles. Why not take advantage of this fact by properly filling out your profile on those sites? You’d probably want to pay close attention to your LinkedIn profile if you want to get professional contacts to add you.

Via Twitter

Twitter has an app dedicated solely to making a virtual business card for you. twtBizCard allows you make a virtual card and append them to @reply messages you send out to other people.

Via profile aggregators

I’ve recently enumerated a handful of profile aggregators that compile your online presence into one nifty page or widget that you can attach to your own website, blog, or Facebook page.

This doesn’t mean that you should rush off to dispose your remaining paper business cards. It’ll take a while before everything completely goes paperless. Also, it’ll be very useful when you meet people in places where Internet in inaccesible or temporarily unavailable.

How about you, have you created your virtual business card?