I wanted to take a minute to talk about social networks and how that word has been skewed by the many people that use them. By definition a social network is:
A social network is a social structure made up of individuals (or organizations) called “nodes”, which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.
Common Misconceptions About Social Networking
Often times it’s been my experience that people think that merely signing up for social networks is all they need to do to be found on the Internet. However, if you look at the word itself, “Social Network”, social is at the very beginning of the compound. A common misconception is that you should blanketly spam these networks with what ever links or offers you may have. While yes you can do this it will not serve your cause as an internet marketer. A social network will do as much or as little for you as you do for it.
A social network is just that a network. More to the point it’s a group of people that share or should share a group of ideas or similar interests. Simply signing up and having a Twitter account will not get you the huge following that you may have read about. Signing up for a Twitter account and engaging other tweeters with same interests or share the same niche as you will go a lot further.
In order to get the most out of the popular social networks out there you must be participating and engaging other readers. You should be following people that interest you and joining them in conversation. Post intriguing or controversial tweets or facebook posts. Force people to react to your content. This will start the commenting.
How To Maintain and Grow Multiple Social Networks
Below is a list of posts I’ve written in the past to help promote and maintain your social networks. All were written to help promote, grow and maintain your social networks and provide the much needed traction you or your company/ boss are looking for.
How To Use Hootsuite to Schedule Tweets
Scheduling tweets is a good way to market prior posts with the addition of different titles and or keywords as well as hashtags. Many times when you write a post people have a number of keyword searches that they use to arrive on your page. Even if you’re using due diligence while researching keywords it’s often hard to determine what keyword phrase or grouping will trigger the most traffic. By retweeing prior posts you can get them in front of the eyes of your followers that may have missed it before. Not only that, but you can and should try different keyphrases in order to generate more targeted traffic.
How To Update Your Facebook Fanpage Status Automatically Using RSS Graffiti
Updating your Facebook fan page is a great way of promoting new blog posts. If you post often or have multiple blog authors this can get to be a cumbersome and repetitive task. In the past, I used Twitterfeed to update my social networks. Due to a api error this has proven to be sporadically effective. So in the interest of automating status updates once again I have found RSS Graffiti to be a great fit.
The Difference Between TweetDeck, HootSuite And Seesmic
Being a social media specialist I manage a huge number social networks for a large number of companies. It can be a lot to keep track of after a while with all the options out there. Shortly after I lost count of all the profiles I was maintaining it became painfully obvious that I needed a program for keeping track of the social identities. With all the options out there it can be confusing to know which program to use so I put together this review to help point out the pros and cons of each.
How To Drive Traffic To Your Website Using Facebook Fan Pages
Are you on Facebook? Sure you are and who isn’t these days so why not take advantage of this bit of demographic info to drive new visitors to your website. This is a fairly simple process, but due to the fact that Facebook is constantly changing how their site works it can be a bit confusing so I’ll do a quick run down here and then show you how to automatically populate your fan page with content from your website.
How to Use Ping.fm And Why You Should Be Using It Now
Ping.fm is a great free web service that enables users to post to multiple social networks at one time. It can be configured to update most of the popular social networks including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Linkedin and many more. As an SEO guy I still submit my posts to Digg, Reddit, Simpy and Stumbleupon manually as these services require a little more finessing, but are no less valuable.
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About Me: Nate Balcom is a web designer and social media guru with over 11 years of experience in the web industry. He specializes in web design and development, SEO and social networking. You can follow him on Twitter here. 
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