Popular social networking sites, including the giants of these, MySpace and Facebook, have undoubtedly changed the human fabric of the Internet.
Largely the domain of a predominantly youthful user base, they are also well supported by older users. There is also a firm base of professionals using it for business purposes also - from advertising to networking.
You will know the names: LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Next2Friends, FastPitch, Ecademy, Photobucket as well as the plethora of blogging and photo sharing sites.
Time is precious to everyone, none more so than to a small business owner like me. Over the past few years I have joined many, often following an invitation by a friend, colleague or business acquaintance.
The trouble is that I now find that I do not have the time to use them to full advantage and my inbox is inundated every day, especially as those creative geniuses at Facebook devise ever increasingly obscure ways to persuade members to spend time not only theirs but, by spreading the web, encouraging me to spend my time too.
This week alone, I received two more invitations to join new social networking sites! So, I have decided to cull my memberships of these sites. It was an interesting exercise so I would like to share this experience with you.
My interests divide into four key areas: business (networking and blogging), personal and music (live music being my passion).
Music was easy. Of all the memberships I have, MySpace is the most dynamic and user-friendly. I have maintained old relationships and made lots of new ones through MySpace and, especially as I rarely get e-mails from them, I am keeping my page (www.myspace.com/headlinepromotions).
Business more difficult to weed out. Of all the networking sites I belong to for networking, only one has actually generated any business contacts - either suppliers or customers. That is WeCanDoBiz (http://www.wecando.biz/). I do like this site and it has proved successful business-wise. It was very simple to register and is free.
Blogging was not an issue. Blogger dotcom (hhtp://www.blogger.com) is no useful and so easy to understand that I would not for one moment consider changing. Some of my blogs are well read (such as my Headline Promotions, Press & Public Relations blog site: www.headlinepromotions.blogspot.com) so that speaks for itself. Others are actually the website content for my domains (e.g. my world record attempt resource http://www.worldrecordattempt.co.uk/) so are effectively free hosting sites and, because of their ease of use, avoid the employment of webmasters to maintain them!
For personal contacts, because of the sheer number of contacts I have on there, I have to remain with Facebook, annoying though that is. It is peoples’ obsession with inviting me to play bingo, or poker or hangman that cheeses me off. Just recently, spammers have got in there and I now receive misspelled invitations to see myself on friends videos; clicking on the link reveals that it is spam with viruses so I hope that Facebook take urgent action to stop this. I am aware that I can reduce the volume of daily e-mails by changing some of my notification options and I am going to do this very shortly to ease the burden on my inbox!
I did actually look at Facebook for advertising but the sheer volume of targets and the time it took to try and work out what and how to maximise the impact of any campaign outweighed any advantage over my existing and effective PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns on Google.
Somewhere in between business and pleasure is a relatively new social networking platform called Next2Friends. I have not yet fully grasped the full potential of this site either for business or pleasure but I am sure it is huge.
I have created a corporate page for Headline Promotions, Press & PR and am working my way through the site to try and grasp how I can use it best. But the ability to video events (whether business or personal) and share them in real time or as video for later access by people I choose to allow, is enormous.
Take, for example, Sunset Lingerie (http://www.sunsetlingerie.co.uk/) for whom I am organising a fashion show. I could video that on my mobile phone and it will appear in real time on Next2Friends and be retained for people to see later. I could, in fact, have it showing live on their website or mine. Similarly, if one of my world record attempts is taking place, then I can show that live or recorded. This is something I definitely wish to explore further.
So, will it save time? I think it will. This means I can focus my attention on the sites I have chosen to continue to support to my advantage and theirs!
