About Social Networking Sites

"Social Networking Sites" Facebook and LinkedIn can have a positive impact on your website’s traffic, and ultimately bring you a great deal of new business. The sites use various streams of traffic generating but, there are differences in how they help you accomplish success and the makeup of the membership.

Facebook is really social, while LinkedIn is very business-to-business oriented. However, Facebook is showing very strong growth, and many business people are finding it to be an excellent resource. You’ll connect with far more consumers on Facebook than you will on LinkedIn, but the business connections you make on LinkedIn can lead to referrals that leverage the value of your contacts.

Both Facebook and LinkedIn allow you to place your personal and business profile for all the world to see. Accomplishments, awards, education, specialized training, and business goals are laid out for everyone to view.

Spending just a few minutes online gives you ample time to ask or answer questions and interact with people from all parts of the country and the world. Your direct contacts have their own direct contacts, creating a possible sphere of influence far greater than any you could develop locally via personal interaction.

A referral or recommendation is much easier, thus you can get more of them. Your direct contacts can recommend you to someone else with a few keystrokes, with no letter or personal meeting required. LinkedIn formalizes the process of expanding one’s sphere of influence more than Facebook. On LinkedIn, there are formalized recommendation formats that can be keyed to your specific areas of expertise. Let’s say that you work both residential and commercial real estate. You can have those two segments of your profile, each with recommendations specific to that expertise.

Both Facebook and LinkedIn allow the sending of questions, but LinkedIn has formalized the process a bit more. A question, once answered by all who are interested, can be closed out, and a best answer and good answer selected. The person who supplied the answer builds “expertise credit” in the category.

Feed your site information to the networks with RSS feeds. Both of these sites have ways in which you can have your site content show up automatically once published, allowing you to write it once, and the information will display in multiple places. It’s a personal form of the syndication that news organizations have used for many years.

These networking sites are powerful exposure tools, and you simply can’t overlook them in planning for the future. In all of your entries and interactions on these sites, you’re placing links back to your website, and when you can, to specific pages or posts that answer specific questions. This builds credibility, but also site traffic. And, it’s coming from sources that are real estate related, as that’s the way you’ve set up your profiles.