Social Networking

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.

Social networking has encouraged new ways to communicate and share information. Social networking websites are being used regularly by millions of people.

While it could be said that email and websites have most of the essential elements of social network services, the idea of proprietary encapsulated services has gained popular uptake recently.

The main types of social networking services are those which contain category divisions (such as former school-year or classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages) and a recommendation system linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with Facebook widely used worldwide; MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn being the most widely used in North America; Nexopia (mostly in Canada); Bebo, Hi5, MySpace, dol2day (mostly in Germany), Tagged, XING; and Skyrock in parts of Europe; Orkut and Hi5 in South America and Central America; and Friendster, Multiply, Orkut, Xiaonei and Cyworld in Asia and the Pacific Islands.

There have been some attempts to standardize these services to avoid the need to duplicate entries of friends and interests (see the FOAF standard and the Open Source Initiative), but this has led to some concerns about privacy.

Social Networking In Marketing

Social Media Marketing combines the goals of Internet marketing with social media sites.  Social Media Marketing goals are different for every organization, however most will involve some form of viral marketing to build idea or brand awareness, increase visibility, or sell a product.

The Top Social Networking Sites

The following is a list of the top 30 social media resources available on the Internet. The list
A recent survey by eMarketer's shows that small businesses plan to increase their spending on social network marketing in 2009. 25% of the small businesses surveyed by Ad-ology Research indicated that they would increase spending on the medium this year, a higher percentage than any other marketing format.

Meanwhile, 33% of small businesses indicated that they would keep spending about the same on social networking, while only 5% reported that they plan to spend less than in  2008.

37% of small businesses in the survey don’t use social networking at all, that’s a smaller percentage than any other medium, including email marketing, search engine marketing, and even just maintaining a company website.

Costs are certainly being cut elsewhere – the unemployment rate in the US is at a 16-year high – but it appears that online marketing is better off than other areas of the economy.
Here’s some tips to help you grow your Facebook group:

1. Build the Right Foundation – Set it up right. Make sure you choose a title, category and description that is most relevant to your brand or target demographic. Offer as much info as possible about your group including contact info, location, purpose. If you want to build real community, allow people to post comments, photos and/or videos in the group. Make your group public so anyone can join.

2. Friends Build Friends – The best way to get people to join your group is through personal invitation – so get busy inviting your friends who are already in Facebook. Your friends’ friends will then notice that they joined a new group and may be interested in checking out the group.

3. Use Email to send Invitations – Facebook allows you to send group invitations to all of the contacts in your Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo accounts, so don’t forget to invite everyone who’s not already a Facebook friend.

4. Update Regularly – Don’t build your Facebook group then leave it to stagnate for 6 months. Update your news and photos and videos and comments regularly. Update your group bi-weekly or more if possible, depending on the nature of your group.

5. Promote Your Group Outside of Facebook – Promote your Facebook group on your website, in press releases, in your blog. Wherever you have a presence online is an opportunity to feature your Facebook group and invite people to join.

6. Be Human, Be Friendly – Welcome new members, send out periodic emails to your group, encourage them to invite their friends. Don’t abuse your members by spamming them with irrelevant information, but keep it focussed on the topic of your group. You’ll notice that many people who join your group will not already be your “facebook friend” — so send them an invitation to become your friend.