Social Networking has been initialized, as the name is self explanatory, to connect with people all over the world. In past times the post office was an important communication center. People used to send birthday greetings, best wishes for Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. Some hallo postcards from holidays or for important occasions as births or weddings have been as important as a phone call from time to time.
Since the age of Internet and e-mailing had started, many people stopped writing in the traditional way (postcards for instance) but changed communication to the online version. Businesses switched from facsimiles to e-mails, private persons from cards to mails. But, not all did so. Not all had a PC available from the very beginning, not all used it immediately for both business and private purposes. And this is where a big communication gap started: some people were ahead communicating almost exclusively via online media and tools whereas others still communicated the traditional way. As life progresses, many got married, changed jobs, moved to different towns and people would lose contacts. This is exactly the ground where Social Networking was born.
Social Networking allows you to connect with people all over the world. You can find friends from college times or your neighbor from high school times. It is very easy and straight forward to tell the world about you, without having to write the same information one by one to all interested. You simply can write it down once and then tell people to go to your Social Network Site if ever they ask you for updates on your business life, on your interests, want to see pictures of your kids and much more.
There are many platforms out there today, MySpace and Facebook being among the best known and most used. There are further platforms as LinkedIn or Xing for instance who address mainly business professionals, where you will find colleagues from former companies you worked for or where you can check to which company a colleague switched to.
Social Networking is not only a great possibility for checking up with old friends and mates, it is also a very powerful tool to find groups of interest. All systems have groups of interest you can sign up to. There you will find people from all over the world that share one same interest. This interest might be singing, painting or online business. It might be cooking, gardening as well as sharing experiences of proud parents. Whatever your interests are, you can be pretty sure to find a team or group in any of the social networking sites. And this is exactly where we come back to the traffic driving aspect of the Social Networks.
Consider the power of a tool that gives you the possibility of having access to a huge group from all over the world interested in let us say golfing. Saying huge group I mean huge group as many of them have over 5.000, even up to 45.000 people (that is I guess the biggest one that I have discovered) subscribed to them! On the other side let us assume that you have a golf course that you are promoting, for instance on “How to increase your score by 10 each time you play”.
Can you already see and feel the power of this? You will just need to look for one of those groups, make friend requests to them (which is quite time consuming but very effective) and then you will not have to do anything else than write about golfing on your social networking site, inform people about and on your blog about all your golfing knowledge and they will come by themselves to get more from you. This will be exactly the moment when they will enter your “traditional” sales cycle, enter your opt-in site (very often known as Magnetizer page) and so on.
In general, it is recommended by renowned Internet Marketers to have a friends list of about 2000 people. I know that this sounds a real lot, and it is. Just consider two important aspects to it:
1) You will grow your list over time, let us say 6 months to have about 2000 is a challenge but a feasible goal.
2) These 2000 people will bring automatically new traffic to your site, your friends list will grow steadily.
A concrete plan and the right tools mixed with best practice examples and suggestions will allow you to start writing or continuing at massive impact your personal success story.
This article has been written by Katarzyna Greco, called Kasia. She has her definite strengths in project planning, persistence and endurance. This is where Kasia has also gained almost 15 years of working experience in renowned companies she worked for, always in an international environment as Kasia fluently speaks 6 languages.
Kasia’s passion in searching for new challenges, new interesting things to learn and to work on, has brought her not only to actively engage and develop herself in the areas of coaching, mentoring and personal development but has made of her a pioneer among the “Newbies” on the Internet.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Katarzyna_Greco
October 30th, 2008 at 12:44 am
For those of you spending a lot of time on social networks, you should make your time work for you and try HopOnThis.com, eZanga.com’s social network. eZanga.com is a search engine that specializes in pay per click advertising, and they recently updated their site adding, HopOnThis.com . Once you are an active member, HopOnThis rewards you with points (for posting comments, inviting friends, blogging, etc) you can trade in for cash and prizes. They also offer features such as page personalization, drag-and-drop features, unlimited space for photos, and much more.
November 4th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Social networks are becoming more important in viral marketing which can give more traffic. Widgets are becoming a staple in the smart social media.There is another way to increase traffic to site using Tell a friend widget.It’s completly free widget which allows content sharing without forcing visitors to leave your site.it can be downloaded at for free at http://tellafriend.socialtwist.com/index.jsp . Thought you’d have something to say about it too.