What Social Networking Can Do for you

Online social networking offers internet users a means of connecting and sharing information with other individuals and groups who share common interests and goals.

Although more popularly known as socializing forums, social networking sites also play a vital role in helping online as well as off line organizations achieve their business goals. Social networking platforms offer businesses a forum for reaching out to potential customers beyond the immediate community.

Social networking sites, especially 'friend-of-a-friend' (FOAF) social networking sites such as MySpace and Friendster, are especially designed to directly connect like minded individuals and groups. Members interact with each other using many innovative tools including discussion forums and private or public messages.

An FOAF network typically displays directories featuring people or topics that all members can browse through. Whenever you find another member with similar interests, you can send the member a message requesting to be added to their list of contacts. This gives you the opportunity to meet other like minded users from that member's network, thereby multiplying your organization’s contacts faster than you could in the real world. With every extra person you add, your network has the potential to expand exponentially.

While you could create a profile on as many sites as you wish to, updating several different profiles and working with several different platforms could be a daunting and time consuming task. Better to spend some time studying the features and user base of different social networking sites and choosing one or two that are best suited for your purpose than to focus on every social networking site.

Here are some of the more prevalent FOAF social networking sites. Though basic memberships are free in all these sites, you have to pay a subscription fee if you wanted extra functionality.

MySpace

The tenth most visited site in February 2006, MySpace is an extremely popular social networking site. It does not cater to a specific audience but gives you the freedom to join any one of the thousands of groups depending on your areas of interest and expertise.

MySpace offers users message boards and blogs, classified ad sections, a space for announcing upcoming events and the opportunity for posting videos, all of which could be used as effective means for marketing your business to a larger audience.

Gather

A social networking site that is very content focused, Gather offers users abundant tools for sharing their stories with others. Gather lets members publish blogs (called articles) and photos, which can be tagged as well as rated according to how valuable they are to the other users. Images and articles that have the highest rankings appear on the home page enhancing the visibility of the site.

Flickr

While Flickr does not offer individual user blogs, it does let you form groups or join existing groups where you can upload photos and share them with other members.

You can also add comments and tags to your photos making it easier for search engines and other users to find you. An idea that is rapidly gaining popularity is publishing images on Flicker under a Creative Commons license.

This gives other users the explicit permission to add these images to their blogs, thus rapidly increasing the presence of your organization elsewhere on the internet.