internet consulting

Sarah Worsham / Aug 1, 2008

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.

Technorati Tags: social networks, social networking, internet consulting

Aaron Worsham / Jul 30, 2008

Instant Widget, simply add RSS [Recipe]

Lets talk content for a second. If you took a moment to consider the websites that you find useful in your business sector most of them are going to be text based. In the financial industry for example, your Bloombergs, Reuters, Barons and Wall Street Journals are all brokering in letters and numbers. Words are their currency, more than dollars, Yens, or Pounds. Likely your corporate site, too, is trading on its reputation to educate your customers through words. All this textual content is going stale if unused.

One idea for your websites leftover content is to make a quick content widget. They’re delicious, non-fattening and fun at parties.

Prep time is 15 minutes.

Here are the ingredients you’ll need.

Text based content
An RSS feed on that content
A widget automator

I take the first ingredient for granted and assume your corporate website is not just a blank page surrounding a small ‘Coming Soon’ picture. Now with your content in hand, gently break it up into smaller pieces. These pieces are going to be used in our RSS feed. RSS feeds are great little additions to any website. They help make content on your site easily available to other computers by encoding it in XML. If you don’t know if your site has an RSS feed, go ahead and ask your web programmer. Okay, now that we have our content broken up we can put it into our RSS feed. The feed isn’t going to do much right now, so just let it rest on your website. We’ll come back to it. Now, lets create our widget using your choice of widget automator sites. For this recipe, I will be using SpringWidgets, but you could use WidgetBox or ClearSpring.

To use SpringWidget you will need to register a free account. Lets do that now at the top right of the screen. Once that is done, go ahead and click on the Express Widgets button on the left of the main page. Now its time to add your RSS feed to the mix. Take your RSS feed and slowly enter it into the field. Try not to spill. SpringWidget will now use your RSS feed to pull in your content, wrapping it with a decorative box pattern. That’s it, you have a widget for your content. Almost good enough to eat.

The serving options are endless. You can play around with your widget, style it how you want. Once you are ready, the bottons on the left will help you embed this widget into Social Networks like Facebook, blogging tools like Blogger and WordPress, or anyone’s web page using the Javascript code.

Sarah Worsham / Jul 29, 2008

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.