One of the most valuable free promotional tools available for your blog or website is Social Networking. Never in history has the "common man" had such quick and easy access to so many "eyeballs" at any cost, much less for free! Think about it - tens years ago it would have been impossible for a regular person to reach millions of people so quickly, and at practically no cost at all. Now all you have to do is create a free account on any Social Network of your choice and within minutes you'll have an instant access and oppurtunities to reach millions of active users, for free.
The point of this blog is to help you connect to your target audience, and leverage this access to monetize your website or blog.  To assist you in this I've compiled a list of the ten most vital Social Networks that any serious Blogger or Webmaster should join. You need to leverage the power and subcribers of these networks to help to attract traffic to your blog/site and help you in building your audience. By no means is this a comprehensive list, it's simply a list of the most powerful networks with the most reach.
("What It Does" and "Reach data" are all sourced and compiled from Wikipedia.Org)
What it does: Twitter is a free Social Networking and micro-blogging service, that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.
Reach: Over 5 million visitors as of September 2008
Why you should sign up: Active Twitter users by nature are more engaged than you average SN user. There are millions of "Tweets" sent per day and active Tweeters are known to get very engrossed in the service. I know of some sites that have built their traffic levels up from Twitter alone. Due to the site's unprecdented ease of access, lively discussions, and the oppurtunity to talk to virtually anyone (Shaq, Obama, and Greg Grunberg Tweet), Twitter is the first site on my list!
What it does: Facebook is a social networking website. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profile to notify friends about themselves.Â
Reach: The website currently has more than 120 million active users worldwide.
Why you should sign up: I don't want to sound like a cliche here, but practically EVERYONE is on Facebook! It's easy to setup an account and you can connect with old friends and current accquaintances within minutes. It's also an excellent tool to showcase your current happenings and web presence!
What it does: MySpace is a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos for teenagers and adults internationally.
Reach: The 100 millionth account was created on August 6, 2006[5] in the Netherlands and the site counted approximately 106 million accounts on September 8, 2006. MySpace.com attracts 230,000 new users per day.
Why you should sign up: See Facebook:)
What it does: LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003 mainly used for professional networking.
Reach: As of December 2007, its site traffic was 3.2 million visitors per month, up 485% from the end of 2006. As of October 2008, it had more than 30 million registered users, spanning 150 industries.
Why you should sign up: LinkedIn offers the benefits for facebook/myspace but for professional purposes. It's great place to begin to develop business relationships and contacts.
What it does: Ning is an online platform for users to create their own social websites and social networks, launched in October 2005.
Ning hopes to compete with large social sites like MySpace and Facebook, by appealing to users who want to create networks around specific interests or have limited technical skills. The unique feature of Ning is that anyone can create their own custom social network for a particular topic or need, catering to specific audiences.
Reach: Currently, Ning hosts more than 500,000 networks.
Why you should sign up: You can create you OWN Social Network FOR FREE. Nuff said'
What it does: MyBlogLog is a social network for the blogger community that is based in part on interactions facilitated by a popular web widget that many members install on their blog. Bloggers sign up for free accounts on MyBlogLog and can initiate a blog community for one or more blogs they author. Other registered members can subscribe to these communities, effectively bookmarking them for future reading and sharing them with their own contacts. Bloggers can then display widgets on their sites which show MyBlogLog online community members who have recently visited their page. These widgets also contain links to visiting members' community pages, and are one way in which users connect with one another. All members can see certain basic information about how many people visit their blog, what links they clicked and where they come from. Members may also view more extensive information about traffic on their site for a monthly fee.
Reach: Currently, MyBlogLog averages approximately 22 million visits to pages with MyBlogLog widgets each day, and the site has over 275,000 registered members. MyBlogLog has a Compete.com rank of under 2,500 and Google PageRank of 7 out of 10.
Why you should sign up: Exellent tool to make your site more sticky and to make visitors in "Regulars". It also is a great vechicle for free, viral promotion.
What it does: FriendFeed is a feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and micro-blogging updates, as well as any other type of RSS/ Atom feed. Users can use this stream of information to create customized feeds to share (and comment) with friends.
Reach: FriendFeed has an active userbase of about 75K users (see: http://user21.com/2008/07/04/friendfeed-has-75000-active-users-personal-research/)
Why you should sign up: The BEST tool to keep your growing community up to date on all your latest "happenings" across all your Social Networks.
What it does: Windows Live Spaces (also known by its users as MSN Spaces) is Microsoft's blogging and Social Networking platform. The site was originally released in early 2004 under the MSN Spaces name to compete with other social networking sites.
Reach: Windows Live Spaces received an estimated 27 million (27,000,000) unique visitors per month as of August 2007.
Why you should sign up: It's not as popular as Facebook or Myspace, but it's still relevant. I would sign up and create a 'space" simply to have an "outpost" on one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the Net.
(360, Groups, Flickr)What it does: Yahoo! Inc. provides Internet services worldwide. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine, Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, news, and social media websites and services.
Reach: According to Web traffic analysis companies (including Compete.com, comScore,Alexa Internet, Netcraft, and Nielsen Ratings), the domain yahoo.com attracted at least 1.575 billion visitors annually by 2008. The global network of Yahoo! websites receives 3.4 billion page views per day on average as of October 2007. It is the second most visited website in the U.S., and the most visited website in the world.
Why you should sign up: Flickr is arguably the most popular photo sharing site on the Internet. There are tens of thousands of users posting millions of messages daily on Yahoo Groups. Yahoo 360, while not big as those monsters FB/MS, still has a large community that cannot be ignored.  Three reasons why you need to be on Yahoo!
(Google)What it does: YouTube, LLC is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. In November 2006, YouTube was bought by Google Inc. for 1.65 billion dollars, and is now operated as a subsidiary of Google. The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos. Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by members of the public, although media organizations including CBS and the BBC offer some of their material via the site.
Reach: According to data published by market research company comScore, YouTube is the dominant provider of online video in the United States, with a market share of around 44 percent and more than five billion videos viewed in July 2008. It is estimated that 13 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute, and that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.
Why you should sign up: Online Video = Youtube. No further explaination required
While there are tons of Social Networks on the Internet, I hope this post gave you a good starting point. My main advice is not to join them just because they are there and that they are free. If you create a online presence, it needs to be consistent across networks and it needs to represent your personal brand. In the end, it's up to you to build the relationships to get your name out there and to keep them coming back for more!
Agree? Disagree? Leave a Comment and leverage MY AUDIENCE to increase awareness of yourself!
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The Ten Social Networking Hubs You Can't Live Without
Tuesday, 02 December 2008
Tuesday, 02 December 2008
© 2012 - Mike Wayne is the Tech Coach
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