Leverage social networking sites

This is a post that honestly I thought I would never write. That is because – confession time – I hate myspace. I, since I can remember hearing of its existence, have at the very least not been able to get into it and on some days developed an active dislike for it. Perhaps it is because the age of its target audience is well below mine, or because, even with a good knowledge of css, their unattractive design is frustratingly not that easy to customize. This problem has been compounded by the abundance of horrible, cheesy templates available from both myspace and third party sources.

But I digress. This is not about my borderline unhealthy distaste for myspace. Here, I want to talk about how social networks have grown up into worthwhile branding tools.

The first, most obvious benefit to using social networking sites to enhance brand awareness is that aside from a time commitment, it’s free marketing. On one hand, it gives you a wider network of exposure for your brand. Who knows, you may get yourself some new customers, or get new people talking about you.

Beyond that, and this is the real point that makes the time commitment worthwhile, every link back to your site counts. Most of the business social networking sites like FastCompany, IncBiz and Entrepreneur Connect let you post articles, and IncBiz lets you post press releases as well. So, you can created targeted links with your keyphrases in every one of your articles. If you keep this up on a weekly basis, your links just keep multiplying without the use of link exchanges, a practice that Google admonishes. Not only that, but if any of the articles you’ve posted on a business networking site gets picked up and syndicated, you’ve just gotten yourself more exposure without doing any extra work.

In a down economy, it is more important than ever not to give up on your branding and marketing. You need to get your brand out to wary consumers and convince them to spend their newly limited budgets on you. Using business social networks to increase awareness of your brand is one cost-effective way to stick to your brand development.