How to Use Social Networking Sites Like Facebook and LinkedIn to Grow Your Business

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Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are some of the fastest growing communities on the internet, with literally millions of users. Facebook started as more of a personal site, but is rapidly adding more and more features that make it great for business. LinkedIn is the leading professional networking site, and is a great tool for business people. There are many other social networking sites like MySpace, Twitter, etc. but for the purposes of this article I will focus on Facebook and LinkedIn. However, the general principles of how to use such sites to grow your list and business online are the same.

The goal of a site like Facebook is to allow people to connect with one another. This is largely accomplished by becoming friends with others. Literally, if you find someone's profile that you want to be connected to, you just click a button "Add as friend". Conversely, when other people find you and want to be connected to you, you will receive an incoming "Friend request" that you can accept or decline. So, in terms of growing the online audience for your products or services, a site like Facebook is great for finding new prospects, and for being found by new prospects.

In addition, social networking sites make it easy for friends of your friends to get connected to you. This means that if your direct network has 200 people, your indirect network, if each of your friends has 200 friends, is 40,000 people! Since these sites recommend friends of friends as possible friends of yours, based on criteria like interests, location, mutual friends, etc. it is very easy to grow your base of friends. In addition, you can see who your friends' friends are and become connected to them that way as well. Your goal, when using a social networking site for business, is to have as many friends as possible that are relevant to your market - either as potential customers or as business partners.

So, when you are setting up your profile on a social networking site, you want to make sure you put your business's blog or website address in a prominent location so that it is as easy as possible for people to jump from your Facebook or LinkedIn profile to your business site if they want to become customers. You can also upload photos of yourself, videos of you explaining things about your business or giving a tour of your location, and any other information that would help people become familiar with your business and put their trust in you. Really, what you are doing when using a social networking site for business is letting people know what you have to offer, what problems you can solve for them, and putting a face (or video) to a name so you can build relationships.

Given the rapid growth of social networking sites, it's a good idea to get your profile reserved and updated today, so that you are positioned to connect and communicate with as many people as possible now and in the future.

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Source by Taylor Garland