Printing Australia

Social Networking and Web2.0 - these are among the latest buzzwords which you'll be hearing a lot of if you aren't already. If you are at all engaged in current developments, you have probably heard about these by now and are aware that social networking sites are a type of website which aim to bring together people with similar interests. Among the most heavily used of these sites are LinkedIn, MySpace 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.

These users are also notoriously difficult to sell to. They will be resistant to any hard sell tactics; take a gentle approach and be subtle when introducing them to your business rather than just hitting them with a sales pitch right off the bat. Having the right product is paramount here, as is the ability to mobilise social networking users to visit your site and to learn more about it.

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.

Suppose that your business is something a bit less appealing to a youth-oriented market; garbage disposal, for instance. MySpace probably isn't the right venue for your business to generate traffic.

Social networking sites are not necessarily the best place for your business' lead generation efforts, in other words. It all depends on your product; other strategies may be far more cost effective for you. Before resorting to social networking to drive traffic to your site, I would urge you to try out some other strategies.

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