Web Social Networking

LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are all designed to help you connect to friends - and their friends. If you can make it easy for your customers to give good referrals to their friends, you benefit. These websites are also set up so you can join groups and respond to questions and gain new friends. As with much of the Internet, there is a lot of junk and wasted time on these social networking sites - so it is important that you have a focused reason for participating.

Some goals of social networking for business purposes:

• To have an easy place for fans of your business to give their opinions. Be sure to have links to your social networking sites on your website, on your emails, and printed on your marketing materials.
• To regularly communicate with your fans with something that encourages them to share the information with their friends.

You can also use social networking sites to do focused advertising (for a fee) - based on people's interests and demographics. As an example, if you are looking for women dog owners over 30, then the social networking sites can target your ad to your exact market niche.

Do you need to participate in all these sites?

You should participate in the sites your customers use. You may have to set up sites on all of them to begin with to see the traffic, and then eliminate the less popular ones. The good news is that all are free.

Include your website URL and increase your ranking

Your website's search engine ranking improves when you have outsiders link to your website. An easy, free way to do this is to add your website URL on your social networking sites. The more social networking sites that point to your website, the better!