5 Common Uses for Social Networking and the effect on your target audience

Ian Collins of Tec­mark SEO Man­ches­ter digs deeper into the com­mu­ni­ties of pop­u­lar social net­work­ing sites blog­gers use and explains how the dif­fer­ent uses of these sites can change your mar­ket­ing strate­gies for bet­ter or for worse. Want to write for us too?

Social Media is the cur­rent big buzz­word in the world of Inter­net Mar­ket­ing, and with good rea­son. It is already such a big part of the Inter­net cul­ture. It is here to stay and should be ignored by mar­keters, or indeed any­body, at their peril.

“Social Media” is an umbrella term used for many dif­fer­ent aspects of the social Inter­net from Face­book to blog­ging to forums and there are so many vari­ants of the same phrase used to refer to so many dif­fer­ent ele­ments of the social web, that it be con­fus­ing defin­ing exactly what social media is.

Just to make sure there is no con­fu­sion, for this arti­cle I am set­tling on “Social Net­work­ing” as a phrase to mean the sites such as Face­book, Twit­ter, Myspace etc, where peo­ple con­nect with oth­ers directly.

It is impor­tant to under­stand WHY peo­ple use these web­sites, as there is a broad demo­graphic on these sites. Some peo­ple use them for busi­ness pur­poses, to net­work and find new deals. Then there are oth­ers who use social net­work­ing sites for purely per­sonal rea­sons and are totally obliv­i­ous to the fact that there is a busi­ness pres­ence in the social net­work­ing envi­ron­ment at all.

It is fas­ci­nat­ing to see that there are so many dif­fer­ent things going on in one place, and even more incred­i­ble that they seem to all work in harmony.

1. Purely Per­sonal Reasons

Eas­ily the most com­mon use of Social Net­work­ing sites, and the main rea­son for them exist­ing in the first place, is for per­sonal rea­sons. The major­ity of peo­ple using Face­book or Myspace keep to the “social” label. It is used for its orig­i­nal pur­pose — to keep in touch with friends.

Some peo­ple will go on sim­ply to update their sta­tus or view their friends’ sta­tuses, or to look at pho­tos from the weekend’s night out. Some use it to con­nect to peo­ple they’ve met, a poten­tial girlfriend/boyfriend per­haps, or some­one who shares the same interests.

One great way of tak­ing advan­tage of the per­sonal side of Face­book is keep­ing in touch with peo­ple hun­dreds of miles away, maybe some­body who has gone trav­el­ling or moved to the other side of the world. In the past it would have been nigh on impos­si­ble to keep in touch, much less keep up to date with what they are doing.

A wall post on Face­book can work when a phone call would be too much, such as sim­ply com­ment­ing to some­body that they should lis­ten to a new song or mak­ing an amus­ing remark. It lets you have small con­ver­sa­tions with peo­ple that you would not nor­mally bother hav­ing if it meant a long phone call.

The peo­ple who use the tools for these pur­poses some­times have no idea that mar­ket­ing is going on, or that it is pos­si­ble to use these net­works for busi­ness pur­poses, and some even sim­ply ignore adver­tis­ing all together.

2. Busi­ness — Con­nect­ing with customers

With the rise of Inter­net Mar­ket­ing, social media is being embraced by busi­nesses more and more. Inno­v­a­tive ways of util­is­ing these tools by con­nect­ing directly with cus­tomers are being found.

Com­pa­nies are see­ing that the best way to con­duct them­selves online is to speak to their cus­tomers directly using these social net­work­ing sites, Twit­ter being espe­cially use­ful for this. It increases the rep­u­ta­tion of the com­pany, gets them pos­i­tive reviews and shows that they really care about the cus­tomer. It also gives a human face to the large cor­po­ra­tion, mean­ing that cus­tomers or poten­tial cus­tomers will feel much more com­fort­able com­ing back.

There are some great exam­ples of this strat­egy online, with a com­pany called Vir­gin Trains being one of the most suc­cess­ful. They have a small team of ded­i­cated and named staff who run the Twit­ter feed as part of their over­all PR role. When­ever a cus­tomer has a ques­tion or a com­plaint about the trains, for exam­ple — the train is late or some­thing has gone wrong with their ticket, they post it on the Twit­ter feed and usu­ally get a pretty quick response.

The response is some­times a sim­ple apol­ogy about a train being late, but it gives a human ele­ment to the com­pany and this sim­ple ges­ture could stop them los­ing a cus­tomer for the future.

They can also act as a sort of cus­tomer ser­vice line, say some­body loses the code to pick up their ticket from the fast ticket machine they will post on Twit­ter, and get a response with the infor­ma­tion they need.

3. Busi­ness – Net­work­ing

There is also the oppor­tu­nity for busi­ness types to net­work and expand their busi­ness on the social net­work­ing plat­form. This can take many forms, and take bits of each of points 1 and 2.

To get a deal is all about know­ing the right peo­ple, and if some­body that you went to school with owns a multi mil­lion dol­lar busi­ness and your com­pany do what he is look­ing for, using Face­book could have you on to a win­ner. A ran­dom friend request from some­body you haven’t spo­ken to since you were 11 years old could be the key to your company’s success.

Alright, so that might have been a slight exag­ger­a­tion. You could expand your busi­ness through old con­tacts as well as new, but it doesn’t mean they will be the fac­tor that leads to your success.

Social net­work­ing sites like LinkedIn exist for this pur­pose; for peo­ple to net­work within a busi­ness envi­ron­ment. It does for busi­nesses what Face­book does for stu­dents and teenagers, it lets peo­ple con­nect. It could find you a new busi­ness deal or could even find you a new job!

4. Mar­ket­ing

Another Twit­ter suc­cess story is Dell and their recent Inter­net Mar­ket­ing strat­egy. Their out­let site sells refur­bished PCs, and they post details about the newest ones on their Twit­ter feed. They also post spe­cial offers just for Twit­ter users, and they send infor­ma­tion about sales, along with dis­count vouch­ers to their Twit­ter fol­low­ers. The com­pany has gen­er­ated $6.5million in rev­enue from this venture.

This shows the power of mar­ket­ing on Twit­ter. This sort of strat­egy works well for e-commerce sites espe­cially as they can mar­ket to an already tar­geted audience.

Peo­ple would not fol­low the com­pany if they weren’t inter­ested in what they have to say. Say­ing that the strat­egy works as an addi­tional extra to the nor­mal every­day oper­a­tions, and not as a new or the only way of mar­ket­ing for the com­pany, it should not be seen as a guar­an­teed win­ning for­mula and is prob­a­bly more suited to an estab­lished brand as they are more likely to get enough fol­low­ers to make it effec­tive in the first place.

It would prob­a­bly not for exam­ple work for a com­pany spe­cial­is­ing in a niche prod­uct, or for a small non-established company.

Social Media Mar­ket­ing is a trial and error busi­ness, so it would be advis­able to put into place exper­i­ments and do a lot of research before putting all of your eggs into the Twit­ter basket!

5. Enter­tain­ment

Going hand in hand with the ‘social’ ele­ment of Social Net­work­ing, peo­ple some­times go on purely for enter­tain­ment pur­poses. Myspace is a prime exam­ple of this, as many famous artists have been dis­cov­ered through these sites (sort of sounds like mar­ket­ing, huh?). Music is a big part but also videos, such as Youtube viral offer­ings, are eas­ily spread on social net­work­ing sites.

The newest craze is on Face­book, with all the game appli­ca­tions that have appeared over the last cou­ple of years. The most pop­u­lar of these is a game called Far­mville which has man­aged to acquire 72.9 MILLION users per month. That is a crazy amount of peo­ple to be play­ing a game about run­ning a vir­tual farm!

Now, a site like Face­book has not really been dis­cov­ered for many of the other pur­poses of social net­work­ing. How many blog­gers do you see mar­ket­ing, con­nect­ing with cus­tomers or even con­duct­ing any sorts of busi­ness through the site? Not many I’ll bet.

It is very impor­tant to know the dif­fer­ent usage of Social Net­work­ing sites BEFORE imple­ment­ing a Social Media strat­egy. If you get it wrong and tar­get the wrong peo­ple you could be jeop­ar­dis­ing your online rep­u­ta­tion as well as any time, effort and money put into the project.

Are you Net­work­ing Correctly?

Has it ever occurred to you that a social net­work­ing com­mu­nity could be so diverse? Are you really reach­ing the right audi­ence, and if so, are you reach­ing them effec­tively? Are you sure that Twit­ter is the right com­mu­nity to be mar­ket­ing your blog on when there are sites like Face­book or Myspace that allow you to become even more per­sonal with your audience?

Let us know what you think of social net­work­ing for your blog, and how you have used these sites for the best of your blog.

Go to top