SNS
What are Social Networking Sites and Services?
The Social Networking Site is a website that allows users to display information about themselves and network with friends and others who share common interests.
Mainly a source of entertainment the ability to identify the interests and personal characteristics of individuals and groups and to market to them is very powerful.
Many of these services exist around the world, some of the more popular are facebook, linked in and mixi. Mixi is probably the most popular SNS site in Japan.
What makes SNS sites so attractive is their functionality. There are a core set of features such as blogs, micro-blogs, mail, file sharing, forums, groups across most of the SNS sites. However, the really popular SNS sites provide application frameworks that allow users and third parties to develop applications that can be integrated into the SNS application itself. This has allowed the functionality to grow with the imagination of the users and for sites like facebook maintain their edge over the competition.
How does it work?
Social Networking Services are web applications that allow users to sign up and build a community of other users around themselves. This community consist of the users other friends and acquaintances.
What the users are able to do depends largely on the particular applications they choose and or the particular focus of the site. For example linked in caters more to the professionals and human resources so there it is unlikely to see a poker game application here. Twitter is another SNS which is centered largely around micro-blogging and has little if any other functionality.
Already existing portals and web apps can also add social networking dimensions to their sites.
How can I use Social Networking for my Business?
There must be thousands of people with the idea of developing the next big SNS website and for each of those people there are another thousand who are tired of hearing about it. However, there are other areas of SNS that are often overlooked. You don't have to make the next facebook in order to reap some of the benefits that come with a social network. Maybe it is possible to add a social dimension to your existing services. This could include things like, forums, wikis, news feeds blogs etc. These tools can improve your ability to communicate with your users and be a valuable source of feedback from your customers, users etc. Not to mention the impact this will have on diversifying and enlarging your foot print with respect to the attention received from search engines.
There is also the opportunity to make use of the existing social networking sites and services. Could your company benefit from having an application on facebook? Maybe your users would like to be able to subscribe to a twitter/rss feed to be notified of special offers and new services?
What METHOD IT can do?
We can help advise you on the possibilities for promotion of your business through Social Networking Services. We can help extend your current website to include social dimensions or help you make use of existing services such as facebook and twitter.
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