Social networking rising in popularity at a dramatic pace. These sites have the potential to join a person with new contacts, to strengthen credibility in your area of expertise, to market your business and there is significant potential for drawing together with like minded individuals.
Video by: Socialnomics09
Beyond expanding your contact base, the significant thing to note is that social networking is a powerful tool for managing your company’s image. You have to think of it in terms of “customer relations.” Certainly there are many get rich quick schemes that push social networking as a means to accumulate fortune, but that simply is not the truth of the matter. More realistically, savvy use of these tools will grow your contact base and ultimately your business but not overnight and not by blatantly selling yourself and your product or service. It’s a way of connecting in the social sense, and with the investment of some time, you build casual relationships that lead to good-old-fashioned word of mouth referrals.
For convinience sake, we are going to divide the Social Sites into two categories-Social Networking Sites and what we will call Social Marketing (Real Estate) Sites. Here is how we differentiate between the two and what their purposes are:
Social Networking Sites – These sites are great for connecting with other people and building relationships. They are perfect for helping set yourself up as an expert in a field or market. They are not good for hard sales! Some good examples are Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and others.
Social Marketing Sites (Social Real Estate) – These sites are great for gathering people and sending them to your site. The term Real Estate is used because these are actually sites where you can control the content, the links, and the comments which may be displayed. You can even use these sites to make sales if you choose.
Social Bookmarking Sites – is a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.
