Saturday, October 11, 2008

Social Networking for Lead Generation

By David B. Ascot

Social Networking and Web2.0: these are basically buzz words that you probably seeing around in magazines and newspapers all the time at the moment. A social networking site is basically a site that is aimed at building a community of people who share interest and activities or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Some of the most common social and networking sites that you might of heard of are: Myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

For website owners, there is something to be noted here - wherever there are people, there is an opportunity to generate traffic for their website. The idea here if you want to generate traffic is to build a community of people who may be interested in the products or services you provide and getting them to visit your site in order to learn more. For business lead generation, there are a few obstacles to overcome along the way.

The audience you'll be reaching is largely a youthful one; most social networking users are 30 or under. If you are trying to present your product or service to say, corporate management who fall in the age range of 34-55, it is not as likely that they are to be found on MySpace. This means that depending on your audience, you may or may not get good results using social networking.

These users are also notoriously difficult to sell to. They will be resistant to any hard sell tactics; take a gentle approach and be subtle when introducing them to your business rather than just hitting them with a sales pitch right off the bat. Having the right product is paramount here, as is the ability to mobilise social networking users to visit your site and to learn more about it.

My colleague Nick Schoonen has a blog (rczero.com) which is target towards remote control enthusiasts - remote control planes, cars and so on. He also has a plan to monetize the site; while I won't get into that here, I will mention that he has been very successful at using social networking to drive traffic to his site. The reason that he has been such a success at this is that the audience he is going for is more or less the same one as is to be found on these social networking sites.

Let's imagine for a moment that you own a waste disposal service. You probably aren't going to generate a lot of interest among MySpace users for this subject; in fact, this is something people are generally uninterested in unless they happen to need that service at that particular moment.

When you are making efforts at business lead generation, social networking sites are not as cost effective as many other strategies you could be using. I would suggest trying out other strategies before using social networking to drive traffic to your site.

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