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The Use and Misuse of Social Networking Sites

When people first encounter social networking sites from a business perspective, they may be tempted to misuse them and in so doing, damage their ability to use them to best advantage.

The Innocent Misuse of Social Networking Sites

The most common mistake people make is that of using social networking sites as bulletin boards for their announcements. This helps a little bit the first few times a person does it, but then stops working. Let’s look at an example:

A woman who just came back from Egypt and has several new techniques to teach in a belly dancing class. She puts up her notices in the local dance studios, sends emails to her former and prospective students and posts on Tribe and Facebook. One or two interested local Tribe members and one or two interested local Facebook members respond to her post, so she thinks she has found an excellent place to advertise.

Six weeks later, she re-posts for her new class offering. This time no one responds. Why? Because the one or two interested local Tribe and Facebook members already responded. Noticing the lack of response, she expands beyond the direct interest groups, hoping to pull in a few more students. This backfires because it gets her flagged. Essentially she has killed her reputation on both sites through simple misunderstanding.

Could she have done it better? Yes!

Web-Savvy Use of Social Networking Sites

Planning way ahead, our belly dancing teacher signs up for several social networking sites. When she gets back from Egypt, she writes a few comprehensive articles on belly dancing, and the particulars of the Egyptian Style and what distinguishes it from American Tribal style and several short articles on belly dancing which she then posts on shared media sites. She makes a few Youtube shorts, actually demonstrating what she is talking about, and places links from her articles to her Youtube shorts, and embeds the Youtube shorts on her own website. She makes sure her website is keyword optimized for her town and region as well as words associated with her belly dancing style.

Then she goes to Tribe and Facebook and asks her friends to “please rate and share my articles and videos.” This creates a buzz of activity around her videos which has Youtube suggest them to users who share the same interest categories. This further increases traffic to her Youtube videos.

She writes her former students and asks them to rate her on Yahoo Local as well as rating and sharing her Youtube videos. She spends $200 submitting a press release about her most recent trip to Egypt and the particulars of the stylistic differences between American Tribal and Egyptian Styles. The press release contains links to both her Youtube videos and to the comprehensive articles on her website. This results in a surge of traffic to her website.

A number of other related websites pick up on the press release and carry it on their sites together with links and commentary which results in a fair number of relevant inbound links being generated, thus raising her Google page rank, which in turn raises the number of people that find her when they look up belly dancing.

When she puts up a class schedule on her website, she finds she is barraged by a flurry of inquiries by phone and email about her classes and finds her self dealing with the problems of abundance rather than the problems of scarcity. She also discovers that people now consider her to be an authority on belly dance, particularly on the differences between Egyptian and American Tribal Styles. Oops! Tah-dah! She’s famous.

So what was the difference?

In the first example, she misused the social media as an advertising venue, pitched her existing associates and it backfired.

In the second example, she provided informative, entertaining content and asked her social network to view and evaluate her contribution. As a consequence, the popularity of her contributions reached beyond her personal network and was picked up by “friends of friends,” and had the effect of creating flurries of activity around her contributions, getting them noticed by the search engines. Because of the value of her contributions, other websites picked them up and syndicated her content, thus increasing the total number to inbound relevant links, which raised her page rank and ultimately the web traffic to her site.

Instead of “preaching to the choir,” she harnessed the power of her existing social network to popularize her content; content which had real value. The result was success beyond anything she had done before.

To take it to the next level, she needs to become a web celebrity.