How to make social networking work for you

Businesses can easily use social sites like the ultra-popular Facebook to their advantage.

With thousands of new users signing up each day to social networks like Facebook, its growing domination of the internet audience presents another channel for businesses to market their products.

The challenge for any business is to find the best way to capture the attention of Facebook's IT-savvy users.

How can you position your business amongst the social networking scene?

Facebook Ads: Facebook ads allow businesses to target users by homing in on demographic information contained within the Facebook profiles. The ads are then displayed when someone in the target group logs on.

Facebook Events: This application is a handy tool to organize and promote your upcoming conference, product launch or function. Efficiency in organising the event is greatly improved as invitations are simple to create and send and you receive guest responses in real time.

Facebook Pages: These pages are customised profiles designed specifically to allow businesses, brands and even celebrities to interact with people online.

Another great way to get your business noticed online is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click advertising, where keywords are crucial.

How can you construct a list of keywords that are likely to increase the number of interested web surfers?

Succeeding with Keywords and Keyphrases: Define your industry niche or market segment more precisely. Net-savvy searchers often have a specific item in mind and they want to be taken directly to it.

Tools and Aids: Use a "Keyword Density SEO Tool" to analyse your web pages and see if you are achieving a minimum keyword density of four per cent (the number of times relevant keywords appear on a web page in relation to the total number of words on that page). Google and Yahoo Search Marketing also offer tools that help determine the type of keywords you can use for SEO and pay-per-click campaigns.

Branding and Geo-marketing: Strengthen the most-searched keyword phrases with your brand name and plug it in relevant places – page titles, headlines, secondary headers, section headers, "reasons why" lists and comments sections.

How to get started in search engine marketing and SEO?

1000 words beats unnecessary graphics: Basic search engines work in a text-based world. Search engine "spiders" (robots sent by search engines to your site for indexing) "read" a website by scanning text content. Ensure your content is relevant, consistent with the theme of your website and unique.

Keywords and keyword density: A good optimisation campaign identifies and uses the right keywords. Put yourself in the place of the shopper and ask how they will find what they need using common terms.

Links: The more links you have pointing back to your website from other sites, the greater the chance search engines will count your website as popular or authoritative.

Once these vital steps are in place, you should be well-indexed by the various search engines as you advance to even more sophisticated SEO measures.

Iona Siolo is the Sales and Marketing Manager at Domainz Ltd. Domainz is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Melbourne IT Limited, a world leader in the supply of domain name registration and other online solutions.

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