It's no good. I've discovered that no matter how much it goes against the grain, social networking is here to stay, and what's more it's good for business. Having spent the past year resisting these networks, reluctant to tell all about anything out there on the world wide web (well it's so public!) I've none the less felt obliged to learn more about them as a marketer. Well I can't miss any opportunities and besides it's fascinating to see how marketing online is changing.
So armed with lists of sites to look at, I've been trawling through them and learned that some are seriously scary until you master privacy settings and they're definitely aimed at different audiences. Facebook for example is increasingly used by businesses to raise awareness whilst Bebo is considered a "younger" network. I'm a fan of Linked In too, which is very much a business network.
Then there's social bookmarking, where you you can bookmark a website for other people to see. These also often allow "comments" like blogs do and the whole shared bookmarking thing is essentially about voting for your favourite websites. Then if enough users vote for a particular site it will appear in a "hot" list of the social bookmarking sites for its category.
All very clever and you can see how word starts to spread and of course more links are made to the original website that was bookmarked. There is, I discovered, a handy "add" tool which you can code into your website pages if you want to make it easy for people to bookmark your content. Have a look at www.addthis.com which provides an all-in-one button, very useful. Now we're looking at our online Marketing Plan Builder to add more of these options - internet marketing has become a much bigger part of the marketing mix and social networking justifiably counts as an important part of online marketing strategy.
Happy socialising!
Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk
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