What is social networking?
OK, so who hasn’t heard the buzz? Social networking this… social media that… bla bla bla. But not everyone knows what social networking means. In the most basic sense social networking means – individuals connecting with other individuals. Yet social networking as it pertains to the internet is what is most commonly referred to these days, therefore that’s what I will explain in this article.
Social Networking is connecting with other individuals with similar interests on the internet.
Currently the most popular social networking tools are Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and LinkedIn. All of these tools are free and yet none of these tools allow you to directly make money from having an account. So while these tools might be great for connecting with friends, family, and new folks with similar interests why do we bother to discuss this topic on a website about making money online? Well the answer is… social networking sites are becoming so incredibly popular that they have become an essential tool for internet marketers to announce new products, web pages, and other promotions that their network might be interested in. Social networking tools are quickly becoming just as powerful for internet entrepreneurs as the big search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
The interesting thing about social networking is that every connection you make is opt-in, in that each side of the connection must agree to make the connection. Therefore you only follow (or connect) with people that you want to. Social networking puts the end user in control, if you don’t like what one of your connections is posting simply un-follow them! That’s one of the reasons that social networking has become so massively popular – it empowers users to get only the information (updates) that they want.
Lets use Twitter as an example. With Twitter you sign up for a free account. The registration is fast and easy and you can have as many Twitter accounts as you want. After registration is complete you will have your own page that you can customize to your liking (example). Making a post is incredibly easy, just type in your short message in the “What are you doing?” window and hit “update”. Bam you just made a “tweet”. Your tweet (update) is placed in the Twitter timeline with millions of other “tweets”. Yet Twitter becomes much more powerful when people are “following” you which means your tweets will be displayed on their Twitter home page and not just in the main Twitter time-line. And if your followers have Twitter notifications turned on they will get an email or even a text message to their cell phone containing every update you make. Can you feel the power yet???
So how do you get people following you?? We will get into that answer far more deeply in future InternetPoop blog articles but the first thing you can do is click the “find people” link within Twitter page and start searching for people that have similar interests. In other words if you are going to be selling bowling balls online make sure to search for bowling, bowlers, etc. Follow as many of these like-minded individuals as possible. When you follow them… they will usually start following you! Other folks who follow them will see that they follow you and it just grows and grows and grows!
A couple things to avoid… avoid the temptation to sign up for free follower or twitter train schemes that you will see all over the internet. These schemes promise you hundreds of followers for free. While these schemes will get you followers these followers aren’t interested in your product and it will be a giant waste of your time, you will find that most of them will eventually un-follow you. Also, make sure to engage your followers, communicate with them, don’t ALWAYS try to sell or promote your web page. Again, we will get into all of these strategies more in-depth in the future.
You can use a similar strategy with all of the other social networking sites (not just Twitter). There are hundreds of social networking websites out there, in fact here is a list of all the social networking sites on the internet. Yet we believe it’s best to stick with the “biggies” such as Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, etc. as these will provide you with the best return on your investment in time.
Please feel free to view the video on the right side of this page as it also explains social networking (we didn’t make the video but it does a good job explaining what social networking and social media are all about).
Social Networking is a great way to drive targeted traffic to your website through connections with interested and engaged individuals.
