ChilliBox

There are two facts concerning social networking that everyone should be aware of. Firstly, it is a big (and still massively growing) sector and is not likely to go away any time soon. Secondly, it is a bit like Marmite – you either love it or hate it!

Interestingly, as a parent, I am the one who loves it, (albeit I make the excuse that I use it for work), whilst my two teenage sons hate it with a vengeance and see it as some sort of potential invasion of privacy. (Reverse our views on Marmite, funnily enough).

Despite opposing views, there are a phenomenal amount of people who do use social networking sites every day and the amount of users has doubled since 2007.

Currently, the three most popular social networking sites are:

• Facebook – 600 million users
  
• Twitter – 190 million users
  
• LinkedIn – 90 million users

Incidentally, the (relatively) newly-launched Google + social networking site is rapidly catching up, with 25 million users already and there are no surprises there.

Potential speaks for itself as there is obviously a massive potential market out there for inbound links and various ways to try and get them, but one of the best long(er) term strategies to leverage them is to observe user behaviour on these sites.

This may seem a daunting, if not impossible, task if you have a big database of clients. However, there are only a few pieces of key information and you will need to establish the best way to interact with them and convince them to pass on ‘the good word’ about your business to their own contacts.

First and foremost, you need to know which sites they are using and the reasons they use them. It could be just one site for purely social reasons or a number of sites for different reasons: basic interaction, asking questions, seeking information or following specific industry trends, as examples. Once you have established the reason, you then have the opportunity to focus the content you may be able to offer.

By doing a little bit more homework, you can move on to finding out who they are interacting with, how and why. That is, you need to establish what type of contacts they have (business or personal), which type of content they regularly look at and what motivates them to (follow, tweet, like, +1) share what they have found. Having done this, you can hopefully make sure that you are offering something suitable to tweak their interest.

Other considerations concern the location of clients. If you are a worldwide concern for example, certain clients, in different time zones perhaps, want to receive your content fresh, in their own ‘real’ time and your posts should take account of this. Others may be full time workers who are only able to get updates during their personal time i.e. breaks from work or even outside of working hours.