Social Networking

Social networking is basically networking by using websites and services that put you in touch with others. Popular forums for social networking include facebook, linkedin, twitter and myspace. Social networking can be an effective tool for branding your business and advertising your services.

Social networking works the same as word of mouth advertising in most cases as your business can be presented to networks of individuals and companies through their "friends".

Social networking has attracted many to the web. It is a convenient way to establish a presence. Most features are free to users and the open source community has embraced the technology often creating valuable software and offer versions for free and open use.

Of the more popular social networking platforms Facebook has grown exponentially while Myspace continues to loose audiences and is becoming more of a band profile website.

Twitter is an interesting tool. Not particularly useful in any sense unless you are a celebrity or someone of interest to an audience or a groupie of some sort.

Little time is required to maintain a social networking presence, minutes a day in most cases. Some argue that social networking is basically useless complaining that networks such as facebook are simply used by companies to send out spam to one another. And in most cases, they are correct.

The main agenda for any entity with a facebook presence is to accumulate as many "friends" as possible. To do this companies will simply add anyone and everyone to their friends list and continuously send out messages about their company, products and services. The result is companies spending time each day spamming one another.

A more direct way of using facebook for networking is to only "friend" clients and those with whom you actually know. The chances that someone who is familiar with you will tell their friends about your company are much higher that with someone who doesn't know your company or have never used your products or services.

While it is a good idea for every company to have a facebook page, it would not be necessary to spend much time using the service as the results of social networking are minimal in comparison to other means of advertising. For instance, how often to you log onto facebook to look for a realtor, doctor or other product or service?