How to "do" Social Networking?

Marketing For Business Profits

To sum it briefly, you should define your audience, locate your potential customers, build a social relationship with them and promote your brand and website. What you choose to do on these sites depends on what your business needs.

Social Networking How To's

In most communities it is recommended to not start out by promoting your brand or website. If you start out by “spamming” you are likely to get kicked out of that social community. The site administrators will most likely ban you from returning. Being too direct in your sales pitch could also scare people away. So, think passive, think indirect...help people with "how to's" "why's". Listen, share and be humble. Bragging about the money are making is not going to win you friends.

What is the next step? Be yourself, be human, open up a little and show people who you are. Tell them your story and focus on things that may help you stand out. Visit communities that interest you personally and get involved.

While initiating contact on social media sites is great, it is just as important to continue to keep in contact. Don’t just start something and not finish. For example, starting posts on a blog is great, but you need to show people you are not just visiting, but are there to listen to them. When people add comments in response they might need a response from you. If available, follow or subscribe to the hot feeds that you have contributed to.

Make a video of you living your life and just being you instead of doing promotional video's about your product. Add a link to your website at the end. That is not to say that you are not able to promote your business, just be creative and add value to the site instead of treating it like a direct advertising platform.

Take advantage of the widgets supplied by most of these sites and post them on your website/blog. Yet another way for people to find you and also makes the most of the viral nature of a community based site.

How to know if it is working

The obvious indicators are traffic and sales, however for the more ‘hardcore’ marketer there is analytic software which allows goals to be set up and monitors conversion rates. If you plan to build your social networking fast, map out a campaign tracking system first. Spend some time planning this from the beginning and you know exactly where the results are coming from and where to invest your time. The most important thing is the ‘doing’ part. So the sooner you get signed up the better!

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How Social Network Marketing can grow your business marketing profits?

Social Media Marketing create opportunities to:

· Adds a human element (you) to your business or product

· Engage with customers directly but informally while hanging out online

· It is fun and simple to do once you know how

· Get traffic to your website

· Create buzz around your website, product or service or brand

· Create inbound links to your website for the search engine ranking benefit

· Creates loyalty and trust

You've Got To Know What Before You Can Learn How

Before you can work out how to successfully incorporate social networking into your business profit plan...

....ask yourself a couple of questions....Do you know what social networking is? How about the different media focused sites? Ever heard of social bookmarking? These are all important concepts to grasp in order to using social networking to profit your business.

Here is list to the popular social networking sites categorized by media type.

1. Social Networking

· FaceBook

· Myspace

· DirectMatches

· Ryze

2. Social Bookmarking

· Technorati

· Propeller

· Digg

· Reddit

· StumbleUpon

3. Content Sharing

· Hubpages

· Squidoo

· EzineArticles

· Gather

4. Media Sharing

· GoogleVideo

· YouTube

· SlideShare

5. Blog Platforms

· Wordpress

· MovableType

· Blogger

Spend some time visiting each site and get familiar with their aim, layout, media and marketing potential for your business. Within your area of interest, look at what is popular and take some notes on why that is. Is there anything unique or undiscovered so to speak that you could tap into?

Let’s take a bit of time looking at the three main Social Media Marketingarena’s.

Social Media Networks: These include sites such as Facebook, Myspace and Beebo. These are online communities where friends can interact and share information with each other. The naturally viral nature of these online social networks can be used to your business ‘s profit.

Social Bookmarking: Social Bookmarking sites is a bit like your "favourites list" on your web browser. But, instead of keeping this list on your computer for just you to see, it is stored on a website where your list can be "tagged" with your specific keywords and crawled by the search engines.

Social Media Sharing : includes sites such as YouTube and Google Video. Users upload video’s or photo slide shows. These applications can bring a flood of new website traffic to your website and improve inbound links to your content.

There is no secret out there. Good quality consistent content spread around the web pointing to your site is all it takes to build a massive traffic network. Most of the so-called "social media" marketing books available are incomplete and vague - very theory based (no meat and potato’s!) Don't let those ‘Special Offers’ get in the way of you running a profitable business. Seek out people who are willing to spend some time with you answering your questions and steering you in the right direction. Contact me via the hub pages contact link and I’d be happy to help in any way I can.