What is Social Networking? They are online communities that connect a network of people with varying interests and locations around the world.
In general, these websites are meant for connecting friends, business networking or just for staying in touch with each others.
The main feature of these communities is "Active communication.
" Social Networks and Internet marketing: As we all know that, doing business is all about building contacts, meeting new people and retaining the old relations.
Making efficient use of social networks is a good strategy for Internet marketing.
Your message or advertisement can be spread to a large group of social network users across the Internet.
These way advertisements get a large exposure.
Unlike SEO, social networks use links as source to get the traffic.
Internet Marketing Through Social Networks: Among different techniques available for social Internet marketing, following can be useful: 1.
Ping.
fm: Used for broadcasting to multiple social networks at a time.
You need to sign up for an account here, give them your login information present at the social network sites (Orkut, MySpace).
Whenever you want to pass on a message, you have to send that message to Ping.
fm account via an email, and it gets broadcasted to those social sites at once.
It saves a lot of time.
2.
FriendFeed.
com: Instead of broadcasting the message, this site blends or centralizes your message or social feeds in one place.
This way your network follows these posts on the blogs and other sites.
3.
Presentlyapp.
com: It is a free web service that allows you to create your own private group.
4.
Buzzable.
com: Use this, if you want to send notifications to all your partners and customers at a time.
The Components of social networking: 1.
Connectors: Often called the "social glue", these people bring with them the others.
For example, once you register on a social site, if you find it good enough, you call others to join it by sending friend requests.
They are the people who are good at making friendships with others.
2.
Mavens or the experts: They are information specialists.
These people advertise about your service via word of mouth.
Once they find something useful, they suggest others to use the same and describe the features, increasing publicity and traffic.
3.
Sales people: They are the people with good convincing power.
They transform unwilling people into buyers or mavens.
In all the Internet marketing techniques, the crucial thing is to determine your target market and make plan accordingly.