From the outside looking in, sites like Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and sites like them are interesting and you may have even dipped your toe into the water guage the temperature, but most folks have yet to decide how important social networking will be to their online marketing efforts.
That’s important, because if you are unsure about social networking’s importance, you will pay less attention, spend less time learning and experimenting and will almost certainly abandon your efforts until you become more convinced that there is a role for social networking in online marketing.
There are 3 primary reasons social networking DOES matter – I would like to hear your thoughts on each one of these:
1. Social networking verus email. Will social networking replace, enhance or simply co-exist alongside email marketing? When you send out a promotion to your list today, can you imagine also involving your social network in that promotion? Absolutely! Just like email, you can’t JUST send your social network commercial emails urging them to buy things, you must first build a relationship, which brings us to our second point.
2. Building relationships. There is a definite advantage of social networking in how quickly and targeted you can build your list. Due to the viral nature of social networking sites, you can start with a core group of a dozen friends and find yourself with hundreds of friends tapping into your message within just a few weeks. Certainly, you need to remain active, produce decent content, understand your target market and know their core desires as well as some of the fringe desires they have to attract and hold attention. However, the rate and relevancy of your social networking friends list can grow very fast.
3. Influence. Here’s where we get into some psychology 101 – specifically buying behavior and influence. The question most people have on their mind when considering social networking in relationship to business is where are the links between chit-chat and buying activity. For some people that link seems too far away to be worthwhile, others who are experimenting find that there is a closer link than many believe between the casual conversations and relationships formed on social networks and commercial activity in their business.
MY NETWORK LOVES ME
If you think about how the internet was structured in the past, basically around organizing information around topical areas such as portals, indexes which could be discovered with search – that is how people found information and eventually decided to purchase products and services.
Now, if we look at how we build our list, even if it is very niche focused, the fact is that our list will be built based on various different angles and types of content – so you end up with a fairly fragmented list of people, at least in terms of buyer interest.
But, social networks are built more in line with how we form relationships in real life, but with global context.
It is this combination of giving global context to social organization of relationships that makes social networking so powerful to online marketers.
When you love a movie, you tell 3-4 friends and they may go see it.
When you discover a book you like, you share it with perhaps 4-5 people at work and they will go out and buy it most of the time.
Why?
Because they trust you, they are friends, they know you, you have built a relationship over time AND your recommendation often comes up in a timely and contextual way.
The same thing goes for social networking. Let’s say you had a list of 400 followers on Twitter and you announce to the group that you just finished a home study course that made you an extra $1000 over the weekend – do you think that would be of interest to your social network assuming they have been built within a social context of those who want to make money?
Our experiements with Myspace, Facebook and Twitter – and to a lesser extent YouTube and other video sharing sites has proven very effective in two major ways…
1. Grow dynamically with very little effort. I began adding a few people to Twitter and it has continued to grow each day with no more than a few 30-second posts daily.
2. Initial announcements for an affiliate launch and mentions of activity on our private membership site have resulted in quite extraordinary conversion statistics – much to my surprise and delight.
Needless to say, I am recommending that we all put more effort and time into the top social networking sites.
To give you a jumpstart – go ahead and add us as a friend on myspace and facebook by:
Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/infozone
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=523913661
And follow us on Twitter
http://www.twitter.com/highertrust
And we’ll make sure to reciprocate and begin growing your network.
