Primer on Social Networking Web Sites for Professionals & Businesses By this point, most everyone at least knows about the more popular social networking web sites like MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook. In May 2007, industry analyst Compete reported that MySpace had over 67 million unique visitors followed by YouTube with 40+ million unique visitors, Facebook trailed with 20+ million. That’s a lot of users!

You might have also heard that businesses and professionals have started to create profiles on these social networking sites, but maybe you’re not sure why. For starters, companies seek to take advantage of the volume of visitors these sites receive and/or to be perceived of as “hip, edgy and with the times,” but still others feel compelled to get in because their competitors already have.

Yet many businesses still hesitate to create social networking profiles. They express concerns that the atmosphere of sites like MySpace and Facebook are much too casual, the range of personalities too broad, and the audience too young. And while the profiles within sites like this are not as skewed as they used to be, in response to the growing demand for businesses to adopt social media, business-oriented networking web sites have cropped up. These sites allow professionals to network in an environment geared towards business rather than entertainment and they are ideal for those of you not quite ready to share profile space with “Zippy Liver Nose” or “ghetto_gal425.”

So if you’re intrigued but just need some help getting started, read on…

Start by Using Business-Oriented Social Networking Sites

Most professional social networking sites cover a range of industries and regions and focus on bringing together business people for recruiting, job searches, credentialing and community building. Here are some simple steps for getting started:

1. Build A Detailed Profile – when you first create your profile, complete it with personal information, education, professional information/resume, and details about your industry and skills. Be specific and spend some time thinking about the words and phrases that best describe your business/services, particularly if you’re creating your profile for self-marketing. Remember that visitors will often search for companies on these sites using specific keywords and phrases.

2. Develop A Relevant Network – Once you have a profile set up, begin to invite others to join your “network” or become your “friend.” Try to avoid feeling like should become some sort of popularity contest: your connections should be quality ones. Make contact with people you feel are relevant to your business, services, target market or who themselves might help lead to other solid connections.



3. Strengthen Your Reputation – To distinguish yourself from the pack, build your reputation by developing a richer online personality such as positioning yourself as an expert. Professional networking site LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com offers a unique Q&A feature that allows you to communicate with other members through questions and answers. The questions you ask or answer will appear on your profile page. Other features like blogging, discussion lists, recommendation features (this feature allows you to recommend others in your network for specific services/products), and file sharing directories keep you in front of members. Keep in mind your content should be relevant and of use to those members.

4. Utilize Contact/Connection Features – After you’ve built up a nice community of like-minded business professionals, you can use the connection/contact features of many social networking sites. For instance, the CityBizNetwork offers an event listing feature for members as well as an email blast feature.



5. Keep Content Up to Date – As with all social media tactics, create regular, fresh and relevant content. Profiles that languish will probably not serve your ultimate objectives. Try to get in and take some kind of action on your profile at least once a month. Often these sites will show alert icons that say your profile was updated which can be a prompt for another member to view your profile again. While you may be thinking that you don’t even have time to update your web site much less your social network profile, keep in mind that content here can be more informal. For instance, perhaps you want to just update your profile image, or add new pictures from a company retreat. Maybe your profile listed your clients and you have a few more to add.

6. Recruiting – Online networking sites can help with recruiting efforts, particularly when most profiles will provide detailed information on past jobs, education experience, prospective employers networks, skill set, and in some cases blog posts, discussion list entries and more. For direct recruiting tools, fees might be involved.

7. Advertising on Social Networking Sites – if you want to market through social media but don’t have the time to get involved yourself, you could always try advertising there. I just wrote another article about advertising on social networking sites for my ClickZ column.

8. Harness Vertical Social Networks – ironically, also posted today to ClickZ by another columnist is a how-to article on using vertical social networking sites that offer some other good tips.

9. Popular Social Networking Sites for Professionals - don’t feel compelled to have profiles on all of these sites, but take a look and choose for yourself:

LinkedIn – Boasts more than 12 million members from 150 industries. LinkedIn is a fairly low-barrier to entry social networking site that is easy to use and has fairly straightforward free features and enhanced features for a fee.

Xing - A direct competitor of LinkedIn with 2 million members.

CityBizNetwork – Local/Regional networking site run by citybizlist and CollectiveX. A good site for building a smaller social network among regional professionals.

Congoo & ZoomInfo – These sites are more like directories / search engines than social networking sites though they offer some similar features and you can set up profiles.

Facebook – Though you might not think of Facebook as a professional networking site, it is quickly becoming one, and with the powerful tools and user base it already has, once you get comfortable with social networking, consider setting up a Facebook profile.

Labels: business networking, social media, social networking

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