How Social Networking Software Can Reduce Market Research Costs and Enhance Your Brand
Todays social networking software allow for a completely different approach to monitoring market demand and answering with the correct supply. A lot of companies are realizing this, but still far too few if you ask me. Below the article will take a look at the key changes social networking has brought and will give you an idea of what you might be missing out on – especially as a small business.
To start of, lets take a look at what the internet really is. The web counts more than 150 million web pages. All of these have been put up by people who have access to the internet via computers. There are websites about everything. Can we see this as a web? A network?
Up to this point, all it is is a huge compilation of web pages. When those websites start linking to each other however, they are creating a network. They have understood that by linking to each other they will have more visitors – even if they haven’t consciously done this. By linking to each other, the quality of all the websites that build up this linked cloud of websites is enhanced. It is comparable to a shopping outlet – by putting them together in a huge building complex, the value of a single store becomes much higher.
Google understood this and provided the tools to navigate around the web. Rather than providing a portal to websites based on human research, it created an algorithm with the intention of ranking of websites bases on(amongst other criteria) the amount and quality of the links to the website. These links have been created by human beings, who decided that something was worth linking to. This ensures the quality of the sites Google is providing easy access to. Initially, google provided a ’search engine’. But what they really ended up doing, is create the worlds largest social network.
So how does this apply to social networking software? Google discovered that the key ingredient to quality is the value that people give to it. Google decided to soak up what the internet visitors were looking at, and then threw it right back at them, neatly organized – allowing even more people to find access to the site. The same can be done on a much smaller scale using social networking software on a website.
Imagine you own a website selling shoes. You could decide to neatly structure your shoes on your site, optimize it for SEO, etc. Every week you could add some shoes and some promotions. You could create an emailing list, and build up a firm basis of customers. That is probably a good way to start. But imagine if you added social features to that site. You could add the possibility for users to review the items on the site, and have the item with the best reviews of the most people appear on top of the site. Other visitors will see this and you’ll end up selling more of it. You’ll find which shoes people don’t like so you can easily remove the item.
In a nutshell, all of a sudden you will have a dialogue with the demand side of the market. You’ll know what they want & what they don’t want- just by allowing visitors to participate in a dialogue and giving them the opportunity to share with others. You don’t need expensive market research any longer.
You’ll have done what Google does (on a much smaller scale). You’ve soaked up what the visitors wanted and threw it right back at them. It could be quite scary – maybe they don’t like any of your products… Which could explain why you are not selling anything… But if you listen to them, extract the value from the network that is forming itself around your product, the network will love you for it. This type of information would cost you a lot of money if you asked external marketing companies to do the research for you.
As the web is becoming more and more polluted by link- builders and e-marketers who are all trying to please the search engines, Google will without a doubt look more and more towards social networking sites to calculate the ranking of sites. It is more and more difficult to build a couple of hundred links to a website in order to make Google think you are important. Building a social network with an active user community might seem a little more hard work, but it can not be faked. If you do it right and listen to your community, not only will you have returning visitors and customers – you will be plastered all over the Google first page results for your niche. Search for any product nowadays and you’ll see that the top organic results are sites which have one thing in common: they are social networks. They are either user review sites or social bookmarking sites.
Choosing the right social networking software is inevitable. Are you looking for a few components to add to your site, or do you want to dominate the entire market by building a separate, single standing social network? Personally, I would advise the latter…It allows you to create a community to which you can sell afterwards, it spreads your name in a viral manner and will skyrocket your brand as a dynamic, customer oriented company.
Looking for social networking software to get you started? Below, a software review site will help you on your way:
http://www.TopCommunitySoftware.com