BrightSurfer

It seems crazy that everyone online wants to be connected nowadays. Everyone wants to know one another! Indeed, social networking has been one of the most popular applications on the web over the past few years. But did you know that you can use social networking to help your business?

As an individual, it can’t hurt you to set up free accounts with all the major social networks (MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, and even Flickr and YouTube) and include the address of your primary website in your public profile. Just be careful with the amount of information that you share publicly, and make sure that there’s nothing listed that would embarrass yourself or degrade your reputation (or your business’ reputation). Avoid publishing crazy or bizarre images, obscene jokes, excessive personal information, etc. Use your best judgment when building profiles on social networking sites. Once you have your profile online, feel free to seek out friends and family to add them as friends - as a personal tip, this will help you stay in contact with many people easily via message and announcement features, reducing the time it takes to communicate with people and allowing you to send out any message you’d like quickly and effortlessly.

Now that you have your social networks setup, it’s time to set yourself up with professional networks. The best place on the web for professional networking is LinkedIn. Their site is very well designed to appear mature and businesslike. The major functions of the site work very well for people connecting with their professional networks, and the site has a very good reputation among professionals (who generally find MySpace and communities like it a bit juvenile for their tastes). Here, you can connect with all of your professional friends and family, and it is highly recommended that you use this site to connect to your clients, vendors, and major customers as well. You cannot go wrong with offering a connection, and you can benefit tremendously from using LinkedIn to keep track of people, their skills, their professional experience, and their business preferences.

Once you have your account on LinkedIn established, you can use the web to find the professional groups and community websites for your working industry, and you can see what they have to offer for online membership and networking, as well as offline membership and events. Example: for media workers, Mediabistro.com is an extremely valuable resource for news, job listings, community forums, and their AvantGuild subscription network.

Now that you know where you can find everyone online, remember to tell people about your social networking profiles, along with your website and marketing materials. Keep your communications brief, to-the-point, and as infrequent as possible. Use your social and professional networks as a megaphone for your company’s message, and watch your business soar!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Brightsurfer Feature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.