Five Steps to Use Social Networks Effectively

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Social networks can be a great addition to our marketing toolboxes.
But social networks can also be great time-wasters, too. Here are some tips for using social networks as effective marketing tools.

1. Join the active networks. There are literally thousands of social networks to choose from (digFoot lists over 3,700). But it makes sense to focus on just three.

    * LinkedIn. Often described as “Facebook for business,” LinkedIn combines a very large user base, excellent tools for finding connections, and lively discussion groups.
    * Facebook. The growth of this network is phenomenal — it’s claiming 700,000 new users every day! Even six months ago, most of my Facebook friends were under 30. Facebook is still a much more informal place than LinkedIn, but it’s becoming a valuable business tool as Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups (see below) evolve.
    * Twitter. Technically, Twitter isn’t a social network, but it can be great for business communication and networking with customers, colleagues and friends. Facebook is highlighting its status update functionality to make it more “Twitterish,” so we’ll see how the two services compete.

2. Create pages for your business on LinkedIn, Facebook and twitter.

3. Join groups within the social networks where people you know are likely to hang out. Increase your credibility and visibility by using your professional expertise to add to these discussions.

4. Post frequently, but judiciously. Meryl’s comments about Twitter overload applies to the social networks as well. I’ll also add that services allowing one to post simultaneously to multiple networks, such as Ping.fm, are great, but should be used carefully.

4. Use the networks’ automated tools and other related automation tools to help you. Here I present two of them:

Twitter Traffic Machine - The Automated Growth & Money Making System.This System Explains How To Grow A Twitter Account Rapidly W/total Automation Via 5 Videos.

Social Bookmarking Software, Social Bookmarking Tool. The best social bookmarking tool. Social bookmarking software to major social bookmarking sites and unlimited sites with scuttlescript support.

The recommendations presented to you are worth the time to learn and use so as to generate targeted traffic for your businesses.

5. Use RSS feeds to follow what the members of your network are doing. The folks who run the social networks want you to visit their web sites, of course, but I find it more convenient to follow the activity of my connections through an RSS reader.

It’s exciting to watch as the social media landscape changes every day. In the near future, it’s likely that some social networks will become important business tools, while others will fade away. In the meantime, we can learn how best to use these tools to increase the success of our businesses, no matter they are online of offline.