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Sarah Worsham

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Which Social Networking Sites Are Best for Promoting Your Business Website Content?

One way to increase the awareness of your products and services (and your brand) is to have your website and/or blog content show up on social networking sites such as Digg, Newsvine, Del.icio.us, etc.  Users of these social networks will hopefully discover your useful content and visit your site – possibly becoming returning visitors and passing on your name to co-workers, family and friends.  Social networking sites usually have different types of audiences, so it is worth investigating them to see which ones work best for your target visitors.

Here is an summary of some of the top social networking sites:

  • Digg – Started initially in the tech industry as a way to link and rank news and articles and has quickly spread to gaming, and off-the-wall.  Digg is trying to widen their audience, but in my experience, many business-related articles are quickly lost in their huge amount of submissions.
  • FaceBook – Started as college students only, but now open to all.  Best for connecting with long-lost friends and for networking with acquaintances.  There are business networks and groups, but FaceBook does not make it easy to separate close friends with business networking acquaintances.  One possibility is to create two personas – one for work and one for personal use.  Posts from your blog can be displayed in your profile and you can create pages to promote your business.
  • MySpace – Probably one of the more mainstream of the social networks, MySpace is heavily used by younger generations and by entertainment and music groups wanting to connect with their fans.
  • LinkedIn – Targets business users who want to keep track of their networking contacts.  Business can join and create groups to promote themselves.
  • Del.icio.us – Is a link sharing social network where you can share links with notes and tags.  Can be useful across multiple industries and a nice way to add more content to your own blog/site (check out their widgets).
  • Technorati – Started as a way to view news on tech blogs (hence the name) and see their ranking (as a function of how many other tracked blogs link to them) – is now used across many industries for an overview of what’s going on in the blogosphere.
  • StumbleUpon – Has a fairly general audience who use the site to ‘stumble upon’ new content that others have submitted.
  • Newsvine – Started as a sort of portal with voting for content from news organization, it now accepts content from anywhere, but still heavily favors news websites.  May be worth a look for your business blog since you can also start your own column on the site.
  • Sphinn – Targets Search & Internet Marketing Professionals.

As mentioned previously, it is also worth taking a look at industry websites to see if there are smaller niche social networks and communities in your own industry.

Need Help using Social Networks to Promote Your Business Website? Get started with a free website analysis or contact us for a quote.

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Using Social Networks for Business – Now what?

Now that you’ve done some thinking about what your business goals are for social networking and investigated where your target audience is…

What will be the reaction to your message?

If You’ll Be Joining Existing Communities…

If you’ve decided to use existing communities and social networks to connect with your audience, take care not to put them all off by posting about how great your company/products/services are.  You’ll need to approach social networking as a way to help your customers (which will also help you).  Start by answering questions and trying to be as helpful as possible.  If the community allows you a profile page – fill it out and post blog entries if possible.  Once you’ve established a reputation for being helpful, you can make some inquiries of the community (to try to accomplish some of your business goals), be they feedback, reviews, etc (obviously some goals won’t require any inquiries if they’re directed towards increasing sales & traffic).

If You’ll Be Starting Your Own Community…

Starting your own community is the most difficult way to go, but sometimes it is the only way to reach your intended audience.  You will need a fairly large time committment to post content (lots of it), market and champion your network.  If you can enlist the help of some fairly vocal customers, it will help your cause (in terms of both effort and reputation).  Since a large part of the initial content will probably be posted by you, again concentrate on helping your audience.  Post frequently asked questions (FAQs) with answers, blogs about what the company is doing, and information to help with your products and services.

Help Your Customers

Hopefully you’ve noticed the common thread: using social networks should be about helping your customers.  Helping them should lead to help for you and will give you a reputation for caring and listening when you need to ask them for assistance.

Other Posts in this series:

What Social Networks Should I Join to Promote My Business?

Using Social Networks for Business – What Are Your Goals?

Using Social Networks for Business – Where Are You?

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Using Social Networks for Business – Where Are You?

Where are the people I’m trying to reach?

This is also an important question because there are a limited number of hours in the day and we need to put our efforts into what makes sense for our business.  Just because you heard about MySpace in the news doesn’t mean that your audience of roofing contractors is there or has even heard about it.  You’ll need to do a little research to find out where your audience is.

Here are some places to look:

  • Start with publications focused at your audience – their websites often offer or link to a existing community.
  • Look to see if there are dedicated groups on existing social networks (like Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn, etc).
  • Use Google to search for your industry name to see if any other websites have or link to a network.
  • Try a blog search to find blogs (try Google Blog Search or Technorati) in your industry – they often have communities or link to them.
  • Ask professionals in your industry if they know of any online communities.

If you still come up blank it may be that there isn’t a community for your industry (yet).  Before you run off to start your own community, it is also important to understand your audience.  Are they even online?  Do they just read websites or will they create content and join the conversation?  The Profile tool at the Groundswell site can help you understand the tendencies of your audience.

Other posts in this series:

What Social Networks Should I Join to Promote My Business?

Using Social Networks for Business – What Are Your Goals?

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