Networking sites for small businesses and owners
Jun 23rd, 2008 | By Kevin Spence | Category: Featured ArticlesThere are too many networking sites out there to belong to them all. I’ve recently pared down the sites I use to LinkedIn, Upcoming and Twitter. I use LinkedIn much as everyone else; as an online resume and rolodex. Upcoming and Twitter I use primarily for this site.
I quit BizNik, Plaxo, Facebook because for various reasons. BizNik never did anything for me, no one I know really uses Plaxo, and Facebook is far too needy for me. Once upon a time, I had a twitter for my personal use but I found the character limit and the outages to be too much. It works better for this site and I do still lurk on twitter to read the chatter. In some ways it has replaced my feed reader.
Honestly, I don’t really understand how I’m supposed to use any of these sites/services as a business owner (or for personal use for that matter.) Upcoming is the most straight forward. Add your event and promote it. LinkedIn sits idle until someone I worked with adds me. Then the conversation moves to email. Not to sound too cynical, but as far as I’m concerned, the killer app of the internet is email. Is there anything more useful?
How do you use all of these services to help your business? Do you use them to promote? Client/Customer acquisition? Education?
I agree completely. I find it impossible to keep up with all the various sites, let alone the logins and passwords for each of them. That said, I know many people who find them useful. Perhaps it would be interesting to do some sort of comparative mini-study to analyze not only what is the most useful tool for the majority of small businesses, but how to maximize usage of that tool. I know our clients at Mercy Corps Northwest would be interested!
While I know Facebook is still fairly limited in its business application. One feature that I know a few people have been testing is the Facebook Ads and Business ‘pages’ To help run targeted ads by demographic. Which you have to agreee they have alot of information on.
Also I know VISA was offering $100 ad credits for small businesses, not sure if it is still an active promotion.
I am not aware of any results or feedback from FB ads, but as always $100 bucks is $100 a small biz didnt have before.