Social networking is a major trend that is radically changing the way we communicate and interact with our friends, family and colleagues. Today, if you want to plan an event, you can simply login to your social networking site of choice, create an event, email everyone within your network an invite and get instant RSVP’s.

As with many big trends online, it’s the early adopters who are the first to sign up to a new site and start spreading the word amongst their social networks. So the website usage grows exponentially due to viral marketing. Once the site reaches a critical mass of users it’s not long before the business applications become apparent. Usually this coincides with the website developers moving to monetise the site in various ways (such as pay per click advertising or pay only services).

So what does this all mean for your business? Well, if you’re still wondering if you should use social networking as a marketing method or if you’ve just tipped your toes into the water, then this article will go some of the way to explaining the benefits to your business and just how you can use specific social networking sites.

We know that one of the first things you’ll be thinking is ‘I’m busy enough as it is, so how can I possibly do justice to social networking as well? The answer is leverage. We’re firm believers in publishing once but distributing many times over. So the same piece of content can keep on working for you on different websites. This is possible due to the development of Web 2.0 where content can be re-distributed very easily so it can reach different audiences.

The easiest way to illustrate the benefits of social networking is with an example. We’ll use a fictional company called Acme Adrenaline Adventure Tours. They put together custom tours of extreme adventures throughout New Zealand. Within the team they have several good writers and keen photographers and they have lots of exhilarating videos of their tours. Every week they are in a different part of New Zealand. They are a prime candidate for social media marketing.

A company like this could use the following mix of sites and technology to reach the right target audience of adrenaline junkies and capitalise on the power of online word of mouth marketing.

YouTube – www.youtube.com, upload their videos each week to the YouTube website. Having a YouTube account solves the problem of how to get videos internet ready and how to store them. It also makes it very easy to add your videos to your website (with cut and paste embed codes). And lastly and probably most critically, the viral marketing benefits of YouTube are massive, so videos could end up on hundreds of websites and blogs. YouTube videos can also be found through normal Google searches (do a search on bungy jumping for example).

Flickr – www.flickr.com – they can upload their photos each week to Flickr.

Facebook – www.facebook.com – create a Facebook page so clients can become fans. Every time someone becomes a fan, the business will gain exposure to the people in the fan’s network – so the fan base can grow virally. They may also like to try the pay per click advertising on Facebook so they can reach their niche market based on demographics and interests. They may also like to create a group on Facebook. One of the big benefits of a group is the ability to email all of your members.

Twitter – www.twitter.com – they can send short micro-blogging updates to Twitter via the web or cellphone. People can follow their updates, and people can discover their Twitter account through keyword searches on Twitter. Twitter can be updated via the web or from a mobile phone through text messaging.

Blogging – They should have a blog with an RSS feed. An RSS feed allows their blog posts to be syndicated to other websites. The YouTube account and Flickr photostream can be linked to the blog so they have a page listing their videos, and Flickr photos can be automatically displayed on the blog as well. They can import the blog’s RSS feed into Facebook as notes – so every time they post a blog it creates a note in Facebook and their fans get notified of the new note. The Twitter account can be linked with the blog, so every time they publish a blog, a notification is sent to their Twitter account with a link to the blog post.

No matter what social networking sites you use, the end result needs to fit into your overall marketing goals, and results need to be measurable. Fortunately, there are excellent tools at your disposal for tracking visitors to your site, and you can quickly discover if you are in fact getting referrals from Twitter for example. Check out our blog post on tracking your website metrics for more information. 

If you’d like help developing a social networking strategy for your business, email us on info@tmlwebsign.co.nz or phone us on 03 366 3340.