subject: Top 8 Reasons Why you Need to be on Social Networks [print this page]
Let's admit it, Social Networks are the current hot buzz of the 21th century, with over 40% of active U.S. adult Internet users now belong to social networking web sites.
Social Networks are essentially specialized tools for building communities where you meet people and maintain relationship easily with them. You can follow users and get followed, create lists using Twitter. You can create your own groups, pages, make friends using Facebook. Not to mention MySpace, LinkedIn,Beboand hundreds of other Social Networks.
Social Networkssimply crowd the online marketplace today.
Here is the top 10 reasons why your business should be on social networks today :
1. Your customers are there. The purpose of business is to create customers and what a better place to find internet users searching for information about your or other products than social networks.
2. Your competitors are there. Knowing who your competitors are and what they are offering can help you improve your products, services and marketing. You can even see how your competitors treat their customers and how customers respond to them. You can use this knowledge about your competitors to create marketing strategies that take advantage of your competitor's weaknesses and improve your own business performance.
3. Establish your presence. If you don't do that, sooner or later someone may impersonate you or your company . It is essential for your global success to manage your reputation cloud.
4. Improve your web presence. being there will improve your search engine ranking. A presence on social networks creates more links to your main site which creates higher search engine ranking and customers will find you easily when they use Google to search for a particular product.
5. Transforming leads to customers. By using social networks tools like forums, RSS, blogs, groups, friends, you allow your best customers to demonstrate their loyalty publicly leading for more branding and viral spread of your message as the friends of your customers investigate each other' interests and see your marketing messages. this will lead your new visitors to become your new customers.
6. A good place for your employees. By starting a group on Facebookfor example and encourage them to interact with the brand you use them as a viral marketing agents. Many companies have employee groups on Facebook, so you should have one too.
7. Bind your company name to the social network URL. You can create a URL using social networks services such as pages in Facebookto facilitate for the customers to find you on these social networks.
8. Good niche for Journalists. Journalists are looking on social networks for story leads and experts to quote. So if you aren't there they will not find you. mashableis one of these Journalists that are hunting constantly for lead stories.
By participating on social networks you get all these free sophisticated tools to start transforming your visitors to leads and leads to customers.
Top 8 Reasons Why you Need to be on Social Networks
