What Is Social Networking? Social Network has become the buzzword in the industry. I have recently heard of opportunities running under the name of Social Network Marketing Businesses. It is a massively popular concept of getting people to talk to one another with common interests and concerns. From kids to grandparents, people are social networking for many hours a day! Social Marketing is not only done from the computer, but it is moving to PDA or Palm Devices to mobile phone device. Since is it a big distraction and people are doing it more and more, companies are blocking access to the sites, limiting access to the sites and monitoring the access to the sites. They are doing this, because it is distracting them from their jobs. So, now we know who all the Social Networking butterflies are let us talk about what they are doing. It allows interaction between users. You can find anyone you ever have know and track people down or even getting to know more people with things that capture your interests. You can use social networking for games, chat, discussions, blogs, sharing photos, and even sharing of information. You can use it for social or business networking. You may want to stay update on current events, so a lot of the news sources provide data to social networking websites. Business owners can share with its customers new product releases. You may see benefits of a products, awards and anything your customers need and want to know. If you are doing multiple social networking, you will want to keep separate accounts. Your friends will not care about your business and business clients do not care what is going on with your best friends child. Basically, social network is a community center that is online. It relies on user generated content. It is sticky and constantly being updated. This is the reason users will come back often to see what they are not current on. All of us want to know what is happening. If you think back to 9/11/2001, everyone was trying to find out what was happening and this was around the world. The social media sites have become a very high volume traffic sites. Everyone is going to them. This is why it is good, because you have easy access to any information or opinion that you want or need. Advanced technology has helped get this launched to to higher internet speeds, faster connections and easy of getting nice looking things shared. Anyone can click a couple buttons and you do not need to really understand how computers work. So things have become easier for people to use the computers. Social networking is a very low cost way to get people to talk together, share information and stay connected. I believe this was one reason that it has become so big is that you can connect with anyone anywhere and you can even have group conversations and in the past, your long distance phone bill would have gone through the roof. Niche social networks are rapidly growing in popularity. Sites where people share a common interest. These are town, hobby, education, state, specific areas people want to connect and grow together as if they were all in the same neighborhood. This allows you to share information and market establishing your expertise. Here is a list of the most popular social networks
• MySpace • Facebook • friendsreunited • talkaboutpersonaldevelopment • Ryze • Ning • Bebo • Friendster • Ecademy • Linkedin Ryze and Linkedin are more of the business side of social networking and Friendster, Facebook and MySpace are more just social networks. This is a good overview on what they are, but I will cover in a future article on how to run your own social network site. Advertising with Facebook