Social Networking
and Your Small Business

You have probably noticed all the buzz these days around social network marketing or social networking, as it is sometimes called. Social network marketing is making use of social networking websites and services in order to promote your business in general or a particular product.

MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter - these are all examples of social networking sites. If you think of real life networking events (i.e., chamber of commerce mixers, conferences, trade shows, etc.), that may help you to envision the virtual world of social networking.

Social networking sites help you to promote your business and your brand and they work best if you already have some sort of web presence of your own, like a website.

If you don't yet have your own website, click here to learn how to develop a great one - even if you are not a "techie!"

Most people use social networking sites to promote the entire business; however, there are some that target specific social groups and targeted marketing strategies to promote specific types of products. Social networking sites are designed to provide individuals with the ability to meet people from all over the world with the same interests. They allow you to place a profile which you can customize and allow you to engage in a variety of different functions including chat rooms, email and personal messages.

Click here to learn how to set up a Twitter account and use it to market your business.

Click here to learn how to set up a Facebook account and Facebook page.

You can also create "mashups" by placing data from a variety of sites onto your profile page. You can combine your own website links with those from Yahoo Maps, or YouTube videos (your own or those created by others), or any other resources that you think your potential customers or clients would find useful. It is this mashup function and the groups that provide small businesses with the perfect online marketing platform.

After you create your social networking account on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, HelloWorld, Twitter, and whatever other social networks you choose to join, the next thing to do is build your list of friends. This is the start of the benefits. The friends list works similarly to an email list. It provides you access to a group of people who share a common interest. Each of those individuals have friends lists that are not necessarily the same and so forth. This is one aspect of something called Viral marketing and just like it sounds social networks provide the perfect building ground for expanding these lists.

Here's a tip for building your friends list - Start off with your own list of friends. All of the sites I listed above have feastures that will allow you to send email to you friends< family, clients, and prospects to invite them to join your friends list on that network. Take advantage of this opportunity.

Then, search for people with similar interests to yours or who are in complementary, but not competing, businesses. When you find them online, search through their lists of friends and invite them to join you.

The people on your friends lists have access to your profile, bulletin board and videos as well as links. You can also send them messages and even update them with notes. This is actually a much faster process for reaching a targeted and specific audience with marketing information than other more traditional internet marketing methods.

You can think of social networking sites as not just a way to expand your business traffic by introducing more people to your products and services but it can also help you to target a more specific crowd. This can increase your conversion rates. The best part about it is the fact that social network sites are completely free which means you do not increase your overhead and at the same time can enjoy the benefits of a variety of internet marketing options.

Social networks are the perfect place to find out about new trends and what people are really after. This can be valuable information when setting up email messages and marketing sales letters. Social networking has a myriad of uses for small businesses interested in finding ways to market their business without increasing their overhead.

Keep checking back to this page for more tips and ideas on how to best use social networking sites to market your small business.

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