You can do... Social Networking

Social Networking online has, over the last few years, become so popular that there are now few regular internet users who do not know of it, or who do not yet use it. It is fast becoming the target market for highly resourced marketing departments for large organisations. You only have to search on the social websites for company “group” pages to see how they are using this media to communicate information

But if you are only a small organisation without the vast resources, how can you make this work for you? 

The key to successful social networking for business is to start by ensuring that your customers are the type of individuals who look for their information on these websites.  Then, looking at which social networking site is going to best suit your requirements – are you looking to have offers, give out information, provide detailed reviews, gain customer feedback? 

There are many sites, facebook, twitter, myspace, bebo and Friendster to name but a few.  All of these are free to join and in some cases provide business accounts, noticeably facebook for which there are now a raft of applications to turn it into a strong business presence for your organisation. These include:

• Business benefits – of all the reasons customers would want to trade with you 
• Business card applications – allowing you to attach a business card to your pages and to encourage others to do so also 
• Testimonials – set as a separate tag to build trust and confidence in your organisation 
• And Facebook itself provides direct marketing to demographically tailored groups – for a cost obviously 

MySpace also boasts the advantage of forums and chat rooms, where lively discussions can take place on topics you are willing to discuss – but beware, you can’t control what is said and therefore must take all information as constructive – your success will come with how you react to this.  Having said all this, the business benefits of social networking are tangible:

• Apart from your time – which can be considerable – it is free 
• It allows you direct contact with customers and prospective customers and therefore you can have a two way dialogue with them – providing priceless customer feedback 
• When launching a new organisation, or even a new service offering it is a quick and easy way of getting marketing information out to many people 
• With over 36million people using the internet last year in the UK, 29million of whom visited at least one social networking site, the ability to reach a new audience is staggering – and all for no or little cost  
• We all know the phrase – “word of mouth” – well online networking provides a great number of advocates for your business every day 
• And obviously, a web presence will be of benefit to your organisation and provide a prompt for visitors to your own website 

Would you like to see more You Can do... guides?   Or for more information on social networking, how to start and what to do, take a look at www.dragontree.org.uk/networking or feel free to give us a call.