The Rise of Social Networking

Is Social Networking important for business?

A recent comScore report highlighted these statistics:

•     -Social networking accounts for 1 of every 6 minutes spent online
•     -As Facebook reaches market capacity (reaching 157.2 million visitors and 73% of the total U.S. Internet population each month), its growth has not been limited. Facebook has increased average U.S. visitor engagement from 4.6 hours to 6.3 hours per month over the past year
•     -LinkedIn, Twitter, and Tumblr have grown at impressive rates

A Sept. 13, 2011 Mashable publication said according to Nielsen Americans spend almost a quarter of their time online on social networking sites. The most popular social network is Facebook, followed by Blogger, Tumblr, Twitter and LinkedIn.

These numbers clearly indicate that there is a huge acceptance of social networking and business should take note of strategies to leverage this acceptance in every cost effective way possible.

The Value of Social Networking

Because of its wide acceptance and the way that people share information social networking sites can help businesses understand public behavior better.  By including social networking in your business marketing plan you have the opportunity to moderate a considerable part of the cyber social media scene as it relates to your brand as you will be able to attract those interested in your brand towards your site where you can be involved in the open discussion that goes on regarding your brand. 

The Challenge Populating Social Networking Sites

The biggest challenge for businesses to engage in social networking sites is taking the time to post activities to social networking sites.  Doing this directly from facebook, twitter or linked in on a mobile phone takes a lot of keystrokes.  Keystrokes can mean extra effort keying information into the social site but keeping new information on your social networking sites is the best way for a business to expand their social networking subscriber base.  In the end, a larger subscription base to your social networking site means more business awareness and more business revenue.  The message is that content has to be regularly updated to keep your subscribers interested in what you do. 

One of the answers to this challenge is to create or purchase tools that are social network friendly.  By this I mean look for business applications that can make postings for you.  If your business uses a contact manager, look for a feature that summarizes your client data so you can post it to your social network site with the click of a button.  If your business takes in reviews create a way for your customers to post their review to your social networking sites.  You have the editing capabilties for your site so ultimately you can control what hits your social networking sites.  If your business creates newsletters regularly or other marketing material create automated social networking buttons for the management page and for your customer facing pages that will forward links to the news letter and if your business is looking for custom mobile tools include social networking buttons for key sites so that your business can regularly communication your mobile activities to your social networking sites. 

Where Mobile Apps Fit Into The Social Networking Equation

Mobile apps are the fasting growing segment of the internet today.   Because of the "on-the-go" nature of the mobile internet mobile apps create great opportunities to share your business events between your subscribing clients and their friends through mobile apps that are social network aware.  For example, if an apartment hunter wanted to get feedback from as many friends as possible about any experiences with a specific apartment community that offered an outward facing mobile app with pictures and a description of the community it would be very easy to gain support for their community by adding social networking links for the most common sites to their mobile app.  The end user could easily forward a twitter link with a note detailing their interest in the community or with the touch of a facebook button send all the pictures of the apartment community to their facebook page then look for comments.   The same could be done with a restaurant app, a department store app or even a service type business like a hair salon. 

Your customers will have more and deeper engagement with your mobile app if they can communicate with their social networking sites.  They will open it more when they can pass on savings details through their mobile phones or share memorable events easily through their favorite site.  As a business you can propogate a lot of this activity by doing some of the work for them and saving them keystrokes through automation. 

A Social Networking / Mobile Strategy Suggested Course of Action

This seems like basic business but many apps today have overlooked social networking integration.  Your mobile app should have social networking links built into it.  By including these links into your app you extend the reach of your app from all your followers to the friends and contacts of all your followers. 

Contact Exposure Elements about our mobile application development using the TxT2Look mobile platform.  The TxT2Look mobile platform extends the reach of mobile apps beyond app stores to develop manufacturer independent browser based apps that support text messaging, QR codes, Geo-Locational services and other tools integrating todays mobile phones with mobile users.