NetSecrets Blog : Web Design and SEO

Twitter - The Next Big Thing?

Twitter is best thought of as miniature personal blogging or a micro blog, as it is centred around the question “what are you doing” and only permits 140 characters per post – just enough to get one coherent thought or idea, or statement out to your ‘followers’. Now, followers are key to twitter being of any use to anyone, otherwise let’s face it you’re talking to yourself and wasting your time. So, when you create your twitter account encourage your colleagues to do the same and find out if any of your business contacts are also twittering away. You can even advise clients and customers to join up to twitter as a way to keep up to date with your products and services. From this point it can be used as an announcer to updates of blogs as well as little snippets of what you have been doing for your customers.

The aim here is to create a community around the brand and can even serve as a forum for advice, tips, tools and resources; the main focus being that if your tweets are of use then you will merit followers, with each follower being potential business.

At this point you may be thinking that it sounds like a lot of work for only a slight prospect of gain. However there are several ways in which you can automate your twitter account so that the upkeep is minimal. You have the option to tie your twitter account in as an RSS feed, but more importantly, you also have the facility to synchronise your blog with twitter; so when you post on your blog the title of the post will be automatically generated as a tweet on twitter with a link to your full post, reducing time spent.

There lies opportunity for you to give news updates, show special offers, new product launches, product ranges,  publicise events and even as a way for people to leave you testimonials.

Facebook - Unleashing the Potential

Facebook is now the fastest growing social network ever and many consider it to be the most popular worldwide. Facebook is endowed with a naturally large user-base as it does not charge a membership fee. Instead, Facebook gains its revenue from advertisers – due to the high level of profiling done on its users, which to many of them comes across as innocent, Facebook is able to operate a level of direct and targeted marketing never before possible online. In addition to paid advertising solutions, there are also some free opportunities for the promotion of your business.

Chances are that your colleagues and business contacts are on Facebook already.  Invite them to become your friends and join your company network (if you have one - see below). Facebook is a much more friendly and interactive environment than social networks like LinkedIn and can be used to form closer bonds with your contacts.

Create a profile for your company - To create a foothold on Facebook, create a profile for your company and a company network. This will allow you to do the following things:

-          Invite your business colleagues, and customers to become your friends, creating a Facebook network around your business.

-          Make postings which will appear in your Facebook friends’ newsfeeds.  These can be about special offers and company news such as job postings.

-          List your items in the Facebook marketplace (see below)

Promote your Blog - If you have a company or personal blog, this can be imported into your Facebook notes.  Your posting will then appear in your newsfeed and that of your friends.

Facebook’s notes settings can be accessed from the applications menu in the LHS of your profile page.

List your items in the marketplace - Facebook has a marketplace where items can be listed for sale.  This is free and could be used promote items for sale on your website or eBay.  Products such as Ztail, make listing items on Facebook marketplace easy.

Social Networking - The Structure

Basics

In general, social networking services allow users to create a profile for themselves, and can be broken down into two broad categories: internal social networking (ISN) and external social networking (ESN) sites, such as Orkut, MySpace, Facebook and Bebo. Both types can increase the feeling of community among people. An ISN is a closed/private community that consists of a group of people within a company, association, society, education provider and organization or even an "invite only" group created by a user in an ESN. An ESN is open/public and available to all web users to communicate and are designed to attract advertisers. ESN's can be smaller specialised communities (i.e. linked by a single common interest e.g TheSocialGolfer, ACountryLife.Com, Great Cooks Community) or they can be large generic social networking sites (e.g MySpace, Facebook etc).

 

However, whether specialised or generic there is commonality across the general approach of social networking sites. Users can upload a picture of themselves, create their 'profile' and can often be "friends" with other users. In most social networking services, both users must confirm that they are friends before they are linked. For example, if Rosie lists Jim as a friend, then Jim would have to approve Rosie's friend request before they are listed as friends. Some social networking sites have a "favorites" feature that does not need approval from the other user. Social networks usually have privacy controls that allows the user to choose who can view their profile or contact them, etc.

 

Some social networking sites are created for the benefits of others, such as parents social networking site "Gurgle". This website is for parents to talk about pregnancy, birth and bringing up children. Several social networks in Asian markets such as India, China, Japan and Korea have reached not only a high usage but also a high level of profitability. Services such as QQ (China), Mixi (Japan), Cyworld (Korea) or the mobile-focused service Mobile Game Town by the company DeNA in Japan (which has over 10 million users) are all profitable, setting them apart from their western counterparts.

 

Social Status

The social status of an individual is revealed on social networks. Sociologist Erving Goffman refers to the “Interaction Order” which he claims is the “part of the social life where face-to-face and spoken interactions occur” (Rhiengold: 2002, P171). He believes that the way people represent themselves provides other users information about them they want others to believe, while concealing the rest. Goffman believes that people also give off “information leaking true but uncontrolled information along with their more deliberate performances” (Rheingold: 2002, P171). Through social networks people are now able to completely control the information provided about themselves through the photos they include, the information provided, whether it be true or false and the friends they make. People are therefore now able to control their personal information and their desired social status.

 

Additional Features

Some social networks have additional features, such as the ability to create groups that share common interests or affiliations, upload or stream live videos, and hold discussions in forums. Geo-social networking co-opts internet mapping services to organize user participation around geographic features and their attributes.

 

There is also a trend for more interoperability between social networks led by technologies such as OpenID and OpenSocial.

Lately, mobile social networking has become popular. In most mobile communities, mobile phone users can now create their own profiles, make friends, participate in chat rooms, create chat rooms, hold private conversations, share photos and videos, and share blogs by using their mobile phone. Mobile phone users are basically open to every option that someone sitting on the computer has. Some companies provide wireless services which allow their customers to build their own mobile community and brand it, but one of the most popular wireless services for social networking in the UK is Facebook Mobile. Other companies provide new innovative features which extend the social networking experience into the real world.

 

Business model

Few social networks currently charge money for membership. In part, this may be because social networking is a relatively new service, and the value of using them has not been firmly established in customers' minds. Companies such as MySpace and Facebook sell online advertising on their site. Hence, they are seeking large memberships, and charging for membership would be counterproductive. Some believe that the deeper information that the sites have on each user will allow much better targeted advertising than any other site can currently provide.

 

Social networks operate under an autonomous business model, in which a social network's members serve dual roles as both the suppliers and the consumers of content. This is in contrast to a traditional business model, where the suppliers and consumers are distinct agents. Revenue is typically gained in the autonomous business model via advertisements, but subscription-based revenue is possible when membership and content levels are sufficiently high.

Social Networking - Potential for Businesses

Social networks connect people at low cost; this can be beneficial for entrepreneurs and small businesses looking to expand their contact base. These networks often act as a customer relationship management tool for companies selling products and services. Companies can also use social networks for advertising in the form of banners and text ads – this is a unique opportunity as many SNS (Social Network Sites) incorporate profiling in their registration process making direct and targeted marketing work on a whole new level. Since businesses operate globally, social networks can make it easier to keep in touch with contacts around the world.

 

One example of social networking being used for business purposes is LinkedIn.com, which aims to interconnect professionals. It claims to have more than 20 million registered users from 150 different industries. Professional networking sites function as online meeting places for business and industry professionals. Other sites are bringing this model for niche business professional networking.

 

Virtual communities for business allow individuals to be accessible. People establish their real identity in a verifiable place. These individuals then interact with each other or within groups that share common business interests and goals. They can also post their own user generated content in the form of blogs, pictures, slide shows and videos. Like a social network, the consumer essentially becomes the publisher.

 

A professional network is used for the business to business marketplace. These networks improve the ability for people to advance professionally, by finding, connecting and networking with others. Business professionals can share experiences with others who have a need to learn from similar experiences. The traditional way to interact is face-to-face. Interactive technology makes it possible for people to network with their peers from anywhere, at anytime in an online environment. Professional network services attract, aggregate and assemble large business-focused audiences by creating informative and interactive meeting places.

 

Over the coming months NetSecrets will be taking these social networks one at a time and telling you specifically how you can use a few effective tools and techniques to maximise your business for the future.

Social Networking - A History

The notion that individual computers linked electronically could form the basis of computer mediated social interaction and networking was suggested early on in the life story of the Internet. There were many early efforts to support social networks via computer-mediated communication, including Usenet, ARPANET and LISTERV, bulletin board services (BBS), and EIES: Murray Turoff's server-based Electronic Information Exchange Service (Turoff and Hiltz, 1978, 1993). The Information Routing Group developed a schema about how the proto-Internet might support this.

 

Early social networking websites started in the form of generalized online communities such as Theglobe.com (1994), Geocities (1994) and Tripod (1995). These early communities focused on bringing people together to interact with each other through chat rooms, and share personal information and ideas around any topics via personal homepage publishing tools which was a precursor to the blogging phenomenon. Some communities took a different approach by simply having people link to each other via email addresses. These sites included Classmates.com (1995), focusing on ties with former school mates, and SixDegrees.com (1997), focusing on indirect ties. User profiles could be created, messages sent to users held on a “friends list” and other members could be sought out who had similar interests to yours in their profiles. Whilst these features had existed in some form before SixDegrees.com came about, this would be the first time these functions were available in one package. Despite these new developments (that would later catch on and become immensely popular), the website simply wasn’t profitable and eventually shut down. It was even described by the website’s owner as "simply ahead of its time". Two different models of social networking that came about in 1999 were trust-based, developed by Epinions.com, and friendship-based, such as those developed by Jonathan Bishop and used on some regional UK sites between 1999 and 2001. Innovations included not only showing who is "friends" with whom, but giving users more control over content and connectivity. Between 2002 and 2004, three social networking sites emerged as the most popular form of these sites in the world, causing such sites to become part of mainstream users globally. First there was Friendster (which Google tried to acquire in 2003), then, MySpace, and finally, Bebo. By 2005, MySpace, emergent as the biggest of them all, was reportedly getting more page views than Google. 2004 saw the emergence of Facebook, a competitor, also rapidly growing in size. In 2006, Facebook opened up to the non US college community, and together with allowing externally-developed add-on applications, and some applications enabled the graphing of a user's own social network - thus linking social networks and social networking, became the largest and fastest growing site in the world, not limited by particular geographical followings.

 

Social networking began to flourish as a component of business internet strategy at around March 2005 when Yahoo launched Yahoo! 360°. In July 2005 News Corporation bought MySpace, followed by ITV buying Friends Reunited in December 2005. Various social networking sites have sprung up catering to different languages and countries. It is estimated that combined there are now over 200 social networking sites using these existing and emerging social networking models, without counting the niche social networks (also referred to as vertical social networks) made possible by services such as Ning where an individual can create their own social networking site.

TweetBeep - Twitter Alerts By Email

Great little application you can sign up for at no cost. Basically it's Google Alerts but for Twitter! Sign up at: http://tweetbeep.com.

And if you aren't yet using Google Alerts to keep track of your brands, industry news and competitors get signed up at http://www.google.com/alerts/

Social Networking - An Introduction

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 created new ways to communicate and share information. Social networking websites are being used regularly by millions of people, and it now seems that social networking will be an enduring part of everyday life. The main types of social networking services are those which contain directories of some categories (such as former classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages), and recommender systems linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with MySpace and Facebook being the most widely used and recognised.

 

Over the coming months NetSecrets will be taking you through the various aspects of social networking. At this point you may be wandering what relevance this has to you and your business...

 

Social networks still remain one of the most untapped resources for generating leads, and we will be sharing with you how you can get the edge over your competitors with some clever little techniques that don't take long but will hold great benefit for you and your business in 2009.