Social Networking

Dan Murphy, Social Media Coordinator for Rhino Living, sheds some light on his experience and knowledge of the top three Social Media Sites!

Here is what he had to say:
Social networking has become a big part of everyday life. You probably hear of friend requests, messages, pictures, invites to events and more social networking related items in daily conversations.

It’s natural that social networking has evolved from just friends finding friends, to people looking for ways to start businesses, find additional business opportunities, and ways to promote their current business.

While these social networks are still relatively new and constantly evolving, there are three social networks that individual and businesses have been using, which you have probably heard about. These social networks are Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Let’s briefly look at each.

FACEBOOK
Facebook is a social media site that was started originally for Harvard students by one of the attending students. Later, it was opened up to other colleges, and now it has grown to what it is today. Currently, Facebook has over 250 million people on it from all over the world, which gives you the ability to reach an absolutely stunning number of people of all ages and locations.

The main purpose of Facebook is to find your friends whether they are local or far away, so you can keep in contact and interact with them. You and all of your friends share your profiles with one another, which can contain items such as blog entries, pictures that you upload, videos, links to websites, and more. You can also use Facebook to join fan pages of products or services you may enjoy, or groups that may interest you. A business can also utilize these items to find potential customers and market themselves.

LINKEDIN
The second, LinkedIn, is a “professional networking” site. This site is where business people can find other business people you have previously worked with and add “connections.” Connections function the same way friends do on Facebook. These are people that you know and trust, have had business relations with and would like to give access to your network. Once you add the connection, you can now share each other’s connections. If you wish, you can then send “introductions” to these 2nd degree connections. These connections can be used to find jobs, search for possible candidates for a job, or just meet new connections to inquire about their company. Plus, recommendations can be posted for people you have worked with and they can do the same for you.

A big difference between LinkedIn and Facebook is the way the profiles are setup. While Facebook allows for pictures of your latest vacation to be posted, LinkedIn does not. What is does allow is a very detailed job history to be posted of your current and past experiences for you connections to view. Just like a resume, your education, websites you have and job experience can be posted as well. You can sign up for various interest groups and participate in their discussion forums. If you want, your profile can also be made public for anyone on the Internet to see so search engines can index it.

TWITTER
The third is Twitter, which is quite different from the other two. Twitter is considered a “microblogging” service, which basically allows you to update people that are watching you (called your “followers”) with what you are up to at the moment. Both LinkedIn and Facebook have a place where you can update your contacts or friends with what you are currently doing. However, with Twitter this is all it is. Perhaps, that is what may add to its appeal. All status updates, or “tweets” as they are called, are done in 140 characters. This makes it pretty quick and to the point! These short messages can be received or sent from any phone with text messaging, due to the short length of the messages.

These status updates could be used for an abundance of things. Sure, you could use it to tell your followers that you’re baking cookies that day. Instead, you could use it to tell your followers that you’re having a promotion on a product, or that you just updated your blog. Updates like that could be more beneficial than just posting what you are doing, which can help your business.

Twitter does not release the number of users using the site, but for it to be in the top 20 websites (ranked by Alexa) around the world, it is used quite a bit. Some reports put this at around 50 million visits a day.

What you may find interesting is not one of these three items are the key to overnight success, as some people may think. Each of these takes time and effort to cultivate your followers.

Investing the time and effort into each these networks (the biggest requirement), being smart about communication and promotion with your users, and using each of these tools properly can surely give you the additional exposure you need to build your business.