How to Choose the Right Social Networking Website for Your Business

With more than 100 social networking websites to choose from, it can be difficult to decide on the right site to invest your time and energy into. You want to join a social network that not only has a large number of participants, but also one that has an audience you want to reach. While having a Facebook Fan Page, Twitter and MySpace for your company is great, you shouldn’t limit yourself to the top three social networking sites.

For example, if your company provides products or services for Business-to-Business companies then Ecademy, Networking for Professionals and Ziggs might be the place for you.  If you’re a design firm, then networking on photo sharing sites such as Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa and Shutterfly is a more effective way to promote your company. You don’t need to be on every single social network, you simply need to select a handful of networking sites and start making your presence known.

So if you don’t know which social network to choose, you simply need to do a little research to find out which sites are right for your company. You don’t want to join a social network that doesn’t have the audience you want. If you do it’s as if you’re trying to sell tutus to bikers.

It is also important that you become familiar with a network’s promotion strategies and policies. You don’t want to get pegged as a spammer; these tools are more about networking, building relationships, and communicating, not blatant sales.

Before you join a social network, you should look at the profile options available to you. Certain websites such as Twitter allow you to customize your profile to reflect your company image while Facebook offers very little customization. You can hire a designer to create a page that reflects your band identity so viewers know whose profile they’re looking at anytime they visit your page.

Remember your profile page is the centerpiece of your social networking strategy and it tells viewers about your company.