Social Networking and Web2.0 are both buzzwords which you probably see a lot of these days. Unless you have been living under a rock the last several years, you are probably well aware of social networking websites - their goal is to bring together people who have common interests. Some of the better known social networking sites are MySpace, LinkedIn and Facebook.
Website owners should see an opportunity here; after all, where there are people there are opportunities to get traffic to their websites. If you want to use social networking to get more traffic to your site, then what you have to do is to bring together a group of people who may have some interest in your offerings and convince them to come to your site to learn more about the subject. However, if you are trying to generate leads for your business, there are a few challenges presented by the use of social networking sites to drive traffic.
The audience you’ll be reaching is largely a youthful one; most social networking users are 30 or under. If you are trying to present your product or service to say, corporate management who fall in the age range of 34-55, it is not as likely that they are to be found on MySpace. This means that depending on your audience, you may or may not get good results using social networking.
Also, social network users tend to be a hard sell - you have to be careful here and not just come off as a salesperson. Introduce your product or service subtly instead of just trying to advertise in the traditional sense. You have to have the right product and be able to motivate your fellow social networking users.
One of my colleagues Nick Schoonens has a blog called rczero.com; it’s devoted to remote control enthusiasts; remote control cars, remote control planes and there’s a monetization motto behind it which I won’t go into. Nick has actually used social networks like Myspace very effectively to generate very significant amount of traffic to that site. That’s because the audience on those social networking sites is exactly the same audience that are going to visit his blog and become a community on his blog as well, so there’s a good match there.
Let’s imagine for a moment that you own a waste disposal service. You probably aren’t going to generate a lot of interest among MySpace users for this subject; in fact, this is something people are generally uninterested in unless they happen to need that service at that particular moment.
To summarise, in the business lead generation, or business traffic generation area, I think that social networking sites are less dollar productive than most of the other strategies we we’re talking about today. If you had to decide, I would suggest focusing on other strategies first.
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