Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Social Media. Wazzat? Part Two

Some time ago I found a website called Squidoo, a place where anyone can write a mini-webpage on any topic. Mine is entitled “All Things Mineral Makeup” (www.squidoo.com/alicecosmetics), and the hyperlinks in it have sent more clicks to my Alice Cosmetics website than some of the pay-per-click ads I’ve done. Squidoo, it turns out, is a social networking site. Some of its peers are LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and many, many more, each with its own format and concept. These sites typically include member profiles that give potential customers (or friends, or those with similar hobbies, etc.) a peek at who you are, what you like, what you are all about. And blogs are an integral part of this internet-relationship-building.

Social networking, I learned, is a new way to communicate with your target audience, a way of “having a conversation” with those who, increasingly, appreciate knowing you in a more personal way. As I learned in a webinar I attended recently, “the most credible source of information about a company is now ‘a person like me,’ which has risen dramatically to surpass doctors and academic experts for the first time.” This according to the Annual Edelman Trust Barometer, published by Edelman, the leading independent global PR firm.

The bonus? Hyperlinks on blogs and social networking sites also mean precious “backlinks” to your website, one of the things Google loves to see when it ranks your website.

Social network marketing can be a lot of work, but I’m a convert. Try it and let me know what you think.

Posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 8:49 am and is filed under Alice Cosmetics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.