How to Leverage Social Networking for Your Business: Part 1

I spent some time talking with one of my contacts back in August about utilizing social networking to promote your business. She was new to the social networking niche, and had no idea how to bring the power of social networking to bear on growing her business. We had a conference call about this topic last week, and I realized that many business owners or self-employed individuals are under-utilizing social networking as a valuable business tool. There aren’t enough resources to show people unfamiliar with social networking how to leverage this tool to grow their businesses.

Part One of this series is going to focus on a general overview, and give you an idea how to get started. Future additions to the series will focus more on specific aspects of utilizing social networking for your business, so keep an eye peeled for the next part in the series.

What is social networking, anyway?

For the purposes of this article, social networking is a description for applications or platforms where people can connect with one another and share their thoughts, likes and dislikes or specific, targeted data. Many types of social networking websites exist, some of the most popular of which are:

Facebook - a social networking platform designed for friends and family to connect and share updates, photos, videos, links and other personal interaction. One of the most popular social networking platforms, with more than 350 million active users. Decent business opportunities and good potential for small businesses or persons of note.

MySpace - another social networking platform similar to Facebook, but with fewer users and less functionality. As Facebook gains popularity, MySpace has been losing users; it currently has 271 million registered users, but that number doesn’t reflect active users. This social networking platform doesn’t offer as much potential for business users, but it is popular with music bands and musicians.

Twitter – a social networking service where people share updates in 140-character “Tweets.” Twitter is growing in popularity, and although Twitter does not release data on the exact number of users, a Web activity analysis in February indicated more than 6 million unique visitors. A Nielsen report in March ranked Twitter as the fastest growing “Member Community” on the Web. Many businesses leverage twitter effectively to keep users updated and offer special deals and offers.

Digg - Digg is a social news website where users can ‘rank’ news stories, articles and websites. The website counts the number of ‘Diggs’ and items with more digs get a higher rank in popularity searches. Digg also recommends items based on the items you Digg. Websites that get a lot of digs get a lot of traffic, and that typically translates to revenue. While this isn’t traditional social networking, Digg is a huge boon for traffic and can bring a lot of revenue to businesses.

Yelp - Compared to the other social networking sites that I mention here, Yelp is relatively small potatoes. Current user data is unavailable, but a news article earlier this year suggested Yelp had around 1.5 million users. However, Yelp is a review website, with focus specifically on restaurants and shopping (although you can post reviews about virtually any commercial service). I mention Yelp because user reviews can be powerful positive (or negative) statements about your business, and a savvy business owner leverages this opportunity instead of ignoring or discounting it.

How social networking benefits your business.

The benefits of social networking vary depending on how you use it and how your business is positioned. Typically, social networking opportunities can bring you page views that translate to potential clients. If your business is positioned correctly, you can take advantage of this increased traffic to capture higher conversion rates. If your business isn’t positioned correctly, or you don’t make good use of social networking opportunities, you’ll miss a lot of potential business.

So social networking serves one primary function: to get you traffic.

It’s up to you to position yourself to benefit from that traffic, and make good use of the opportunities presented by increased traffic.

Prepare your website for social networking.

First and foremost, you won’t get much benefit from social networking unless you have something to show people. Even if you have the best product or service in the world, you can’t convince people of that online unless you show them something. You need an informative, dynamic website to capture your readers’ attention. You need more than a one-page website with company contact information and a basic mission statement.

Look for an article in the next few weeks about how to create an engaging website. I have a lot of experience with this topic, and my article will feature helpful tips and common mistakes to avoid, as well as pointers on how to make sure you’re ideally positioned to capture your audience.

Begin using social networking services.

Once your website is ready and you’re confident that you’re ready to interact with your readers, begin utilizing social networking services. The next several articles in this series will talk about specific ways to utilize various social networking platforms for your business. In general, though; provide information, be transparent to your readers and don’t spam your followers.

Provide information. Use your social networking opportunities to tell readers about your products or services, or to advertise special opportunities. Sales are a great jumping-off point for launching a social networking campaign, but you can use social networking in many ways to promote your business.

Be transparent to your readers. Some companies and businesses simply use social networking to communicate with readers. A Web host, for example, might use social networking to communicate down-time, server issues or planned maintenance. While readers don’t want to hear about bad news, most appreciate hearing it from the source instead of being left in the dark to guess at what’s happening. You can also use it to talk about positive features or upcoming plans, but transparency promotes a sense of personal involvement with your readers. This is a very good thing.

Finally, don’t spam your followers. If your readers get endless promotional messages about products, services or sales, they might stop following you. You want to keep readers engaged. Give them good information, but don’t drive them away with excessive posting, or posting that has little value. This is a fine line to balance, and a seasoned social networking consultant can be extremely helpful in taking the right approach.

Next time.

In the next part in this series, I’ll begin looking at the ways you can utilize specific social networking platforms to promote your business. Look for the next part in the series on Thursday, December 17. [EDIT]Obviously, the next part in the series did not appear on Thursday, December 17. My apologies – I picked up a couple of extra projects that required my immediate attention and I got pulled away from my blog for a while. I’m currently working on drafting Part 2, and expect to have it live in January.[/EDIT]

In the meantime, if you have any questions or anything to add, I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to drop me an email or comment the post and I’d be happy to open a discussion.