Leveraging Social Networking

Is it marketing, or is it SEO? Somewhere in the realm between, lies Search Engine Marketing, which is marketing targeted at increasing search engine traffic to your site.

Social networks can help with that. People with a lot of connections or “friends” on social networks seem to get a higher advantage than those with few. That is because each time you make a connection, your link then appears on their profile too.

So it makes sense to get more connections. Only you can’t do it haphazardly or hastily, or it can hurt you. And you don’t want to abuse it, because like link exchanges, search engines will disregard what they think are unnatural patterns.

When you know someone from one social networking site, it makes sense to link up with them on others though. That’s usually pretty hard, because they don’t tell you where else they are networking.

That’s one reason we added a feature to help with that to our new network, Front Porch Folks. Because it makes sense to leverage the social networking connections of people you already know. I’m not sure how easily you can do that in other venues, especially since many of your connections will be networking on sites that charge a fee, and you can only afford so many of THOSE before you go broke! At $10 to $30 per month, you can’t afford more than two or three, and those ONLY if they work!

Social networking only helps though, if it brings people back to your website, or causes them to pick up the phone or email you to increase your business. If you find that you have a profile that is popular, but that does not help your business bottom line, then you probably have left out something critical somewhere.

Connections can help increase the pagerank to your profile, but that will only help your website if you have a countable link back to it, or if other people put your link in their profile. Not many networks have that kind of capability, but a few do.

Think about not just networking where you are, but about networking your networking. You’ll get more out of it.