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The Growing Trend of Social Networking

Over the years, the World Wide Web has developed into a more interactive place for anyone to get involved in. This is especially due to the advent of Web 2.0 properties – the newest generation of web development and design, which facilitates information dissemination and collaboration on the World Wide Web. The exact term for this activity is “social networking.”

Today, social networking has become the growing trend online and this activity is being upheld by social networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis and blogs, to name a few. The aim of these sites is to basically, build communities of people who share common interests and activities. You see, the internet is crowded with millions of people all over the world who are looking for firsthand information and experiences with just about anything and social networking never fail to attend this need.

Be it with the task of knowing a certain kind of medical condition or aiming to develop friendship; seeking for a job or simply finding for a vacation getaway, answers are at hand through social networking.

Social bookmarking is where websites like Del.icio.us, Digg, and Furl allow users to share their personal favorites (bookmarks) with others. Users tag each bookmarked website with the keywords they feel are most relevant.

Now, instead of using a search engine to find information, people can search tags that will display all websites bookmarked with that specific tag. These amounts to a human referral or vote for the site and its relevance to the subject being searched.

Other versions of social networking include blogging social networks – primarily Technorati.com. Technorati indexes blogs based on the amount of incoming links those blogs have, as well as the tags associated with their posts. More examples of this so-called blogging social network are Wetpaint, Hubpages, Xanga and a lot more.

But the most popular social networks of today are Facebook and Twitter as MySpace have given way for these two incredible websites. Facebook is in fact the one that holds the title as the leading social giant in the World Wide Web. According to the statistics made by comScore, Facebook hit 200 million unique visitors two months ago, after soaring 116 percent last year. Now, Facebook has grown to an even more 150 million users this month.

With regards to social video sharing sites, YouTube still remains on top as comScore accounted it for 31 Percent of the 2.5 billion videos viewed online in January of this year. Youtube as a mega network allows citizen filmmakers to share their visions with the world and spread the word about what matters to them.

As for many business companies, they have developed in them the need to get involve in social marketing. They have find that these media networks are potential goldmines stock full of future Speilbergs, Bloombergs, and Oprahs – all potential broadcasters of their marketing message.

How Will Social Networking Help Your Site Traffic Grow?

ComScore reported the status of social networking in the UK and results have proved how a huge number of individuals are doing business and leisure in various social networking sites.

Now, basing on the result of that study (May 2009), it shows that 80% of users among all age groups visited a social networking site at least once, spending an average time of 4.6 hours there. Young adults belonging to 25 to 34 years showed prominence with an average of 89%, and older groups isn’t falling behind that much, as 67% of those aged 55 or more visited a social networking, spending an average of 3.7 hours there. This goes to show and experts have claimed that social networks are starting to eclipse traffic from the major search engines Yahoo! and Google.

So, if your company is not present on any of the major social networks, you’re missing out on the easiest, fastest way to access this great percentage of internet users.

How Do I Get Involved in Social Networking?

Working with social sites is similarly working with the media. Give them good enough stories, secret, tip, or resource that they can sink their teeth into and you’ll have an army of talkers spreading the word about you and your business. And this translates into referrals, which convert into sales on an average of 67% better than cold leads (search engine results). So, even if you reach less people through social networking, your conversions will be far higher.

Now, how are you going to make this conversion feasible? Here are some proven strategies for you to apply:

Article or Blog Promotion

With article and blog promotion, you need to incorporate blog posting or article marketing. Make the contents written purely to capture the imagination and interest of your target market.

For instance, if you sell pet beds, gifts, and items, we will develop a series of blog posts or articles that discuss a controversial or “hot off the press” topic that pet lovers either find highly valuable as an information resource, or highly intriguing or emotionally stimulating. We will then promote it to various social bookmarking and blogging networks, as well as popular bloggers – who will then circulate the story and generate traffic back to your website.

Social Promotion

Know your target market base on what your business has to offer. Given the example aforementioned, if you are selling pet accessories among others then basically, you are targeting pet owners most especially pet lovers. From there, implement social promotion campaigns on networks like MySpace, FaceBook, Catch27, and CraigsList to spread the word about your business and make sure to choose the right category for you site to be acquire the best conversion rate that you are aiming for.

In case you notice that your business does not target the “ MySpace or Facebook crowd”, you can always devise a creative campaign to get the net buzzing. Try incorporating Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies.

How Does Social Networking Work With SEO?

As more and more internet users begin to use tags to find information (a tag is a keyword that a human associated with a website, vs. a keyword that a search engine attributes to a website), Search engine marketing professionals cannot ignore the growing dominance of the social networks.

Know that the partnership between social networks and search engines are an excellent and balanced marriage. Sure, social networking gets you in front of people who no longer use search engines in lieu of finding their information through referrals or bookmarks/tags. But the added, and perhaps more exciting bonus, is that while you grow in popularity with social networks like Facebook and Twitter, your search rankings will continue to increase as a result, if you incorporate SEO strategies. In turn, your popularity signals Google that you are an authority in your market according to your human audience.