Social networking is all the latest rage in marketing today. And for a good reason, too. It’s an extremely effective tool which, if you use it well, can really help your business. If you aren’t familiar with the term “social networking,” it refers to online communities and groups such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ecademy, MySpace and so on. It’s a place where people share business and social news, incite discussions, increase their contacts and raise their online presence.

By virtue of being online you are able to make thousands of connections in a fraction of the time it would take to meet that many people in person. You are more likely to make contacts across the country and around the world that you could without an online presence. This gives you an even larger network, which means more people are forwarding your details to people who could use your services, etc. This also means that you have a wealth of information at your fingertips for other business services that you could utilise for your company (or your life!).

Another brilliant aspect of social networking is the multiplication of your information. So for example, if I post information about my online business services on Twitter, I have just over 30,000 people following me who will see it. And if even 1% of those people ReTweet me (re-post that information), then I have another 3000 postings about my business for the one I put up. And those 3000 postings are going out to all the people following the person who ReTweeted me. This means that one little post about my business is now reaching 100,000-200,000+ people. This is the power and the magic of social networking. And to answer your suspicions, yes I have gotten not only great contacts but also new business from sites like Twitter and Facebook.

A final and hugely important element of social networking is that it builds your online presence. This is very important to any business as the world today is online. People are more likely to go to the Internet before to look for businesses than they are to go out driving around. Since social networking includes various posts, blogs and listings, it vastly increases your SEO margin and makes you more likely to get noticed out of the sea of businesses. Also, each site can be used to point contacts back to your website to promote your business.

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