Social Networking Sites and Your Business

These days, you can't run an online business without being a member of several social networks. This is a phenomenon that has revolutionized the e-commerce business. I myself, get emails about news ones every week. The key to success with social networks is to know which are the best ones, and how to use them.

Now, you might think that social networks are for kids. Not at all! The most widely known social network is MySpace. Many people, even those who don't own a computer, have heard of MySpace by now. Thousands of people, all over the world, have profiles on this site. What a lot of people are not aware of, is how many of those people use this site to network their business. Other social networking sites are Facebook.com, Twitter.com, Zenzuu.com, Ladieswholaunch.com, to name a few. However, there is a real art and science to using this media to its best advantage.

These days, the marketplace is very crowded. Our email accounts are bombarded by all kinds of messages regarding products, services and business opportunities. We are skeptical of most as we don't know if we can trust the person who sent us the email. We have no idea who they are or if their offer is legitimate. We usually delete the message after reading it, if we even read it at all. Well, you don't want to be the sender of that deleted message.

The key to getting your message read is to make sure that your recipient knows you are. Purchasing leads and sending emails with an autoresponder used to be the main way of reaching your target audience. With that method, you were lucky to get a return of 2-3%. It was a costly and not very efficient way of reaching the people that really wanted and needed your product or service. Using Social Networking sites changed all that. Most are free to use and you can reach a wide audience. You put yourself out there in a non-threatening way - that is why when you add people to your network they are called "friends". Through the blogs, pictures, audios and videos that you upload to your site, people are able to get to know the real "you" at their leisure. You are not putting yourself "in their face, but in a way, you are. By displaying what you have to offer in the way of products and services to a wide audience, you allow the people who are "really" interested, to come to you rather than you pursuing them. We call this "Permission Marketing".

When that person contacts you, they will be coming to you with a challenge that they need help with. Whether it be losing weight, improving their health, learning how to start and run a small business, or buy the product that you are offering, they are giving you the opportunity to solve their problem and alleviate their suffering. If they know you and trust you and consider you a "friend", they will be more willing to come to you with their problem and will feel more confident that you will truly take a personal interest in helping solve it. When creating a profile on any Social Network, the most important thing to keep in mind is that you need to let your audience get to know the real you. Always keep it genuine and be sincere. People can detect a phony a mile away, and you don't want to project a slick appearance. That doesn't mean that your profile or page shouldn't appear professional and well-organized, it just means that you need to show your audience who you really are. You can do this by uploading pictures of your family and where you live, create audios so that your audience can hear the enthusiasm in your voice about what you are doing, create a video so they can actually see and hear you, or create a blog, so they can learn how you feel on a daily or weekly basis about what you are doing. Each site has its own features, so it's a good thing to concentrate on them, one at a time, to maximize your presence. Once you join a network, it's a good practice to research any tools and applications that you can use to help organize your profile, your friends and any groups your join or create on the networking site.

I hope that this article has gotten you to thinking about how you can use Social Networking sites to brand yourself on the web. If you have any questions about the article, or want more information, please feel free to email me at jt@bestmarketingwithjudyt.com. I encourage you to visit my website at www.bestmarketingwithjudyt.com and go to the Judy's Social Networking Sites tab, to see examples of how I created a presence on the web with this media.

- Judy Tarasek