Nothing succeeds like social networking. If you are a businessman you know how much value social networking has in real life and on web. All the social networking sites have gained popularity not for making friends but for spreading business too.
There are business communities in popular social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn etc. And there are social networking sites for making business. LinkedIn is a social networking that is used by 50 million professionals for sharing professional knowledge, ideas for individual growth and job opportunity. You can set the professional identity of yourself and your business on LinkedIn. Your potential consumers may be present in LinkedIn. If you know a particular person on LinkedIn, you can easily find him as the site has a directory of its members. You can see the list of members even if you don’t sign up for the site. For start-up businesses, small business social networking sites help a lot.
A business social networking site can be effective to build your business in following ways:
- Ready market: You can find your clients, financers and advisors from a business networking site. You may even find a business group related to your trade.
- Profile building: Building business profiles on social networking sites help a lot. You can submit your website or blog link, business information, product or service details and their respective pictures.
- Communication: Social networking sites give you ready-made tools for communicating with your prospects. You can send direct individual message or bulk common messages in the form of a bulletin. Social networking sites give you live chat option through their own instant messengers. You can also send request for communication through friend request.
- Different products on same profile: Ever heard about ‘lenses’? Squidoo.com is a popular networking site for showcasing your products of various categories and writing product descriptions in the form of small articles. You can show your whole portfolio on a single page. See this link of business cards on squidoo: http://www.squidoo.com/1stImpressionsCount
- Upload video, audio: Modern social networking sites give you facility to upload and share your business promotion and advertisement videos and audios. Take the example of You Tube. The video sharing site has plenty of corporate videos to prove its use for business purpose.
- Network of Networks: If you have accounts in multiple social networking sites, you can get updated information of all your memberships and prospects by logging into a single account.
According to a research by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, most of the Inc. 500 CEOs use social networking as part of their business strategy. Among 148 companies surveyed, 91% CEOs of the surveyed companies use at least one social networking tool. The six categories of social networking tools for the survey were blogging, podcasting, online video, social networking, message boards, and wikis. You can understand how social media is extensively used by the top CEOs.
Social networking sites are changing their status also. Twitter was not formed to make business networking. Now it has a wing for business networking. http://twitter.com/EXECTWEETS is a community of executives who are already Twitter users. And for IT professionals, another community, ‘ExecTweets IT’ is formed. Even Microsoft likes business networking!
You can see that social networking sites were formed to grow your network. But the founders of social networking sites even think for business! As business is within everything why not there should be social networking sites dedicated to business? You will notice more business networking sites in next five years. Developing business contacts will be much easier for you by these social networking sites.
thanks for the great article you wrote. i find it very interesting
The only bad thing is that using social networking sites you have no control of the content and you never know who overtake the site (and your account) in the future. That’s why we decided to buid or own social networking site – with good CMS ready for it, it isn’t that big deal as expected. We use Kentico CMS in its social networking edition, but the Community server seems also very promising.