Klaxxon Consulting

Long lasting first page results get you noticed.
Engaging on-page content wins sales.
The net buzzing about your business builds credibility.

What is Social Networking?

At one time, search engines were the only reliable way to find information online.

Web 2.0 (interactive, dynamic websites that promote or operate as social networks) has changed that, as people can now easily find information and websites that other people recommend.

The most recent Web 2.0 innovation is social bookmarking. Sites like Del.icio.us, Digg, and Furl allow users to share their personal favorites (bookmarks) with others. Users add tags, made up of keywords they feel are most applicable, to their bookmarked websites.

As a result, people can now search tags that will display all websites bookmarked with that specific tag. Essentially, tags are human referrals or votes for the site and its relevance to the subject being searched.

Blogging social networks are another form of social networking. A popular blogging social networking site is Technorati.com, which indexes blogs based on the amount of incoming links those blogs have, as well as the tags that label their posts.

The most popular social network is MySpace. Despite this site enjoying over 20 million unique visitors every month, few businesses and website owners have thought to utilize MySpace.

Two powerful emerging new social media networks are revolutionizing audio and video: YouTube and BlogTalkRadio. They allow citizen broadcasters and filmmakers to share their visions with the world and spread the word about what is important to them.

Not many realize it yet, but these media networks are potential goldmines that could have future Spielbergs, Bloombergs, and Oprahs - all of them being potential broadcasters of your marketing message.

 

How Will Social Networking Help My Site Traffic Grow?

Studies from June 2006 show that 2 out of 3 people online visited a social networking site. One out of every 20 website visits is to a social networking website. Experts are saying that traffic to social networks is starting to overtake traffic to major search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Therefore, if you don't start utilizing major social networks, you're missing out on the easiest way to communicate to 67% of Internet users.

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How Do I Get Involved in Social Networking?

To utilize social sites to the fullest in your business, you need to give them a good enough story, secret, tip, or resource that will excite them enough to spread the word about you and your business.

This can lead to a high number of referrals, and it's been proven that referrals convert into sales 667% better than cold leads (that come from search engine results.) Therefore, even if you get fewer people from social networking sites, your conversions of those people will be considerably higher, making up for the smaller number.

This is why we target various social networks through a variety of methods:

Article or Blog Promotion

We manage several blogs and article pages for our various clients that contain posts written purely to capture the attention and interest of our client's target market.

For example, if you are selling pet beds, gifts, and items, we'll write a series of blog posts or articles that discuss a controversial topic that pet lovers will either find very insightful as an information resource, highly intriguing, or emotionally stimulating. We then will promote it to various social bookmarking and blogging networks, as well as to popular bloggers, all of which will circulate the story and bring traffic to your site.

Social Promotion

We implement social promotion campaigns on MySpace, FaceBook, Catch27, and Craigslist to spread the word about your business. Though it is particularly effective for clients who target teens, young adults, musicians, or other highly active social groups, even if your business doesn't target any of those target markets that frequent those social networking sites, we can almost always create a campaign to get the Internet buzzing about your business.

How Does Social Networking Work With SEO?

Search Marketing professionals can no longer just focus on search engines and are paying more and more attention to the growing dominance of social networking websites as more and more Internet users use tags to find information.

However, we see the partnership between social networks and search engines as an excellent and balanced marriage. While social networking will get you in front of people who use tags and referrals to find information rather than search engines, the real bonus for you when you grow in popularity on sites like Digg and MySpace, is that your site's search engine rankings will rise as well.

Google will see your social networking popularity as an indication that you are an authority in your market.