Simon Houghton

If you missed it read the first part of this post here - Social Networking and how its changing the internet - Part 1

Social networking is easy and it is fun. It is a way that you can enhance your online business and have a lot of fun in the process. You can meet some of your very best potential customers on social networking sites. You can make friends and influence people as well.

It has long been a well established fact that more business is actually conducted in social settings than in offices.

More deals are made on golf courses than in board rooms in the real world and more sales are made through the use of social networking sites on the Internet than through all of the paid-for advertising combined.

People HATE commercials but they don’t mind hearing their friends recommend a product or service. Not only do they not mind…they even go to a lot of trouble to seek out that information.

In addition to being a great way to advertise a business social networking sites are also a great research tool and one that should never be overlooked. Rather than having to conduct a lot of expensive and time-consuming surveys for example, you can simply look through a social networking site and find out exactly what people are thinking about.
You can find out what their problems are and what measures they are taking to solve those problems. You can find out what their interests are and how they go about pursuing those interests.

By using social networking sites as research tools, you can likely get more and better information in a single hour and for free than you could get by spending hours on sending out surveys and trying to decipher the results.

One very interesting social networking site is called 43 things. That is the name of the site. On this social networking site people list their goals and then other people with similar goals discuss how to best achieve those goals.

Some goals that have been listed are ‘learn a foreign language, be a good parent, improve my memory, get in shape, lose weight, be a better gardener and the list just goes on and on.

As a research tool it would be hard to beat 43 things to find out what people are interested in and concerned about.

Web 2.0 is great! It is driven by those who actually USE the internet and not by people who are sitting behind desks at large companies and who are out of touch with the real world.

Social networking is simply a group of like-minded people exchanging information that is of mutual interest. That is all it is and all it has ever been.

It is important that when you are using social networking sites that you remember this and conduct yourself accordingly.

If you join a site and start just posting blatant advertisements, you are not going to be doing social networking.

You are simply doing advertising…which people hate. If you establish yourself as part of a group, then you are social networking and you will find that those who are members of your online social circle are the best help you can find anywhere.

Social networking is valuable in and of itself but it can be made doubly valuable by using social networking in conjunction with social bookmarking.

Join a social networking website. Find a group of people who are interested in the topic of your website but don’t start out advertising that.

Make posts to your own blog on the social networking sites as well as to the blogs of others. Add those links to your social bookmarking account. Be certain that you use the appropriate key words in those tags otherwise they are worthless.

Altogether this is an excellent marketing strategy. It is a way to market your website and your products or services and have a lot of fun at the same time. You will meet people that you really do like and even admire and respect.

Friendships are not made for the purpose of profiting from them but they usually are profitable.

If you missed it read the first part of this post here - Social Networking and how its changing the internet - Part 1

Tags: Social networking, Social bookmarking