The wagon train is leaving and if you are not on it you better catch up! It is the latest phase in web media, social networking. Surely it is not new, I myself have had a Myspace page for years and met my husband via online dating, but social media is now business centered and a very important tool for you to add to your marketing plan.
Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace are just a few of the many social networking sites. There are many that are niche centered, even one for women in their forties, but we want to focus on business social networks. I have spent almost two years with a severe back injury and in that time I have taken the time to learn and explore how these social networking sites work for business. The most important thing is if you don’t have a Facebook page just for your business, if you aren’t using Twitter to network your business, and if you’re site doesn’t interact by provide RSS Feeds, and allow people to comment and share your site with these networks than this article is for you!
Your site alone will not drive traffic alone. Your site is only one part of your online marketing tools. If you use the internet
correctly you will find that YOU can drive traffic to your site just by using the social networks for business.
Some Statistics for You:
So now you’re thinking “social networking is for teenagers, college students,…” STOP thinking that way. Today there are “more than 200 million active users” on Facebook, out of that 200 million there are more than 100 million that log on to Facebook once each day, and more than two-thirds of those users are outside of college. In fact according to the stats Facebook says the fastest growing demographic is the group of those 35 years and older.
Do I have your attention now?
This is just Facebook’s statistics (http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics). Now think of the potential amount of marketing you are missing by not using this tool to promote your business?
Not quite convinced yet? Okay let’s head on over and check out the statistics on Twitter. According to Nielson Twitter’s growth just February 08 to February 09 was 1382%, growing from 475,000 users to 7,038,000 users! Additionally according to the statistics from Nielson Twitterers (a.k.a. Tweeters) are not primarily teens or college students as you might expect. In fact, in February the largest age group on Twitter was 35-49; with nearly 3 million unique visitors, comprising almost 42 percent of the site’s audience.(2)
In my personal experience I find Twitter and Facebook to be more adult orientated. I have found I use MySpace to stay in touch with my kids, to blog about general life events rather than a marketing tool.
Where to begin:
Well if you have a Facebook Account consider to sign up for a user name that promotes you or your business. You can also create a page for your business, but we can cover that in another article. Sign up for Twitter is your second assignment. It’s easy to do and easy to update, 140 characters is all that is required for you to type in to update your network.
What is an RSS Feed?
You may see on some sites a button with orange and white on a site, this tells you that the site provides an rss feed. However, some sites have a RSS feed but it may not feed correctly. If you link to an RSS Feed and pull the updates into your site watch to see if the content of the feed changes, if it doesn’t change than the site is static or the RSS Feed is not set up correctly.
RSS Feeds On Your Site
Google and the rest of the search engines are now pinging your site for fresh content, when was it last updated. If your content is static and has remained the same for at least 3 months your site could eventually lose its search engine ranking. To protect your ranking or to improve it providing the ability to have others link to an RSS Feed within your site gets users to return to your site. Posting RSS Feeds within your site allows you to maintain fresh content.
Next article we’ll cover groups you can join to network on these applications as well as how to set up a page for your business.
In the meantime if you’d like us to sit down with you and help you build your social networking for your site please give us a call 719-293-2079.
sources for statistics:
1: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
2: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/twitters-tweet-smell-of-success
