All Entries Tagged With: "social networking"
Google Friend Connect Or Facebook Connect? Which Is Right For You?
Everyone seems to be comparing two new social networking applications – Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect. I haven’t tried the latter, but I have tried the former. But this post isn’t about which is better. It’s about which is better for you.
How do you decide whether you should use Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect for your blog? Or neither? First, ask yourself this question, “Would having your very own social network aid your target audience?”
If the answer to that question is yes then you’ve taken the first step.
Now you just have to decide whether Facebook Connect or Google Friend Connect is a better choice. Either way, it’s a big step and you should know what you are getting into. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:
- Are you a member of Facebook and are you active there?
- Do you see a need for Facebook and would it improve your networking any?
- How are your technical skills?
- Do you have it in your budget to hire a developer to help you set up a social network?
- Is your target audience using Facebook?
If your answer to any of these questions is negative then you shouldn’t bother with Facebook Connect. You should use Google Friend Connect instead. Here’s why:
- Google Friend Connect is easier to install for the average user.
- Facebook Connect is proprietary and if neither you nor your target audience can benefit from networking through Facebook it just doesn’t make sense to use their service because you can’t use it with any service other than Facebook; Google Friend Connect, by contrast, is open source and therefore provides the ability to network across multiple websites.
- Even if your technical skills are not that great, if your audience is on Facebook and you have the budget to pay a developer to install Facebook Connect for you then it could pay off in the long run (you need to be where your audience is).
Social networking is here to stay. Thanks to both Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect, niche websites can get in on the niche social networking action now. To find sites that use Google Friend Connect, visit Friend Connectified.
Twitter Tips: Just A Little Friendly Advice
After Twittering for a couple of months I’ve got a few tips on how to best use Twitter for some effective marketing:
- First, add valuable information, not trivia
- Shorten your long URLs because you only have 140 characters
- Don’t spam – you won’t get link juice from your tweets any way
- Don’t make your tweets short sales come ons
- Be selective choosing your friends and the people you follow
- Manage your time; it’s addicting
- Don’t follow everyone who follows you
- Don’t just click on any link; some people hide malware with short URLs
- Brand yourself with your company name as your Twitter profile
- Block spammers
Twitter is a useful tool, but it is a tool. Know its limitations and don’t expect miracles. You can increase your reach with Twitter, but it doesn’t happen overnight.
Brought to you by Blog Content Provider.
Why I’m Killing My Facebook Friends
I’ve been deleting my Facebook friends. The reason is pretty simple. I’ve discovered that the best way to go about social networking online is the same way you’d go about it off line. I call it the segmented approach.
Let’s say that you have a day job where you make specialty marketing products, you have a networking marketing business on the side where you sell herbal health products, and your hobbies include bicycling and gardening. Obviously, these are very different interests and many of the people currently in your networks within those three areas won’t have any interest whatsoever in your other interests. That is, your marketing customers won’t all enjoy bicycling or gardening, nor will they all be interested in your herbal health line of products. Why waste their time trying to talk about things in which they have no interest.
When you go to your motivation meeting for your herbal health products, you don’t stand around talking about biking up your favorite mountain range, do you? That is, unless you meet another bicycling enthusiast there. And you don’t stand around discussing gardening with your marketing specialty customers who have no interest in gardening. So why would you do that online?
I’ve decided that, in order to manage all of my interests better, to focus my networking efforts at each social media site that I use on specific goals related to my areas of interest. And that’s why I’ve been deleting Facebook friends. I’m about to completely delete my MySpace profile (because I’ve started another one that is specifically geared toward one of my interests).
I virtually have two interests that I manage online. Naturally, Internet marketing is one of those. The other is poetry. For those of you who don’t know, I write poetry and have done so for 20 years. I’ve decided to use Facebook and MySpace completely to network with other poets and people interested in literary topics. I’m using both of those networks to market my poetry and connect with others with that interest. If I decide to start networking with others interested in Internet marketing through either of those sites, I’ll set up another profile geared specifically toward Internet marketing.
But I think I can network with other Internet marketers in other ways. Sphinn, for instance, is a great networking site for Internet marketers. So are a few other places that I like to hang out. But because of the content nature of Blog Content Provider, we are a service provider to a variety of types of businesses, some of which may not be Internet marketing specialists, I have other ways of connecting with potential prospects.
There are a ton of social media sites that are useful. The trick to using them most effectively is to find the ones that can benefit you the most and through which you can meet the type of people you want to meet. I’m a big user of StumbleUpon and I’ve figured out that it’s a great place to show my versatility of interests. I can network with poets and other literary types, Internet marketers, other small business people, and persons interested in politics – all through StumbleUpon. Otherwise, I’m segregating my social networks.
BlogCatalog Makes Viral Marketing Easier
BlogCatalog has announced that it will be introducing a new social marketing tool. They’re calling it the Social Dashboard. The idea is to aggregate users’ social networking and social bookmarking accounts.
I just logged into my account and was hit with the Dashboard face, which is pretty blank right now. But it looks like a good tool. Right away, I see the social aspects of it:
The first thing I see is the big red BlogCatlog box in the upper left corner of my browser. Then, below that is the Dashboard header and a little red Beta next to it. Good clue!
Below the two sentence introduction to the Dashboard there are five tabs labeled News Feed, Discussions, Groups, Broadcasts, and Neighborhoods. Below that are two links: “Try adding some friends” and “updating your subscriptions.”
I haven’t been very active on BlogCatalog, but I may start being more active now. It looks like it could actually be a more effective tool for bloggers than Facebook, which is a bit more social than anything else. At least with BlogCatalog you can choose your friends based on whether or not their blog is in the same industry as yours. Facebook is a little more difficult as you have to select your friends based on a collection of interests or geographical location. Neither of those are really very helpful for business bloggers.
What I like about BlogCatalog is you can consolidate your friends and interests from various social sites like:
- Flickr
- MySpace
- StumbleUpon
- Del.icio.us
- Digg
- Technorati
- MyBlogLog
Personally, I think the list is incomplete. There are other social sites out there could be rolled into BlogCatalog for greater effectiveness, but I do like that MyBlogLog, Flickr, Technorati, and StumbleUpon are included in the list. I think Facebook is more helpful than MySpace, and YouTube would be a nice addition.
Anyways, it does look like a useful application and I’m looking forward to playing around with it. Gotta go now. I’ve got a lot of BlogCatalog friends to make.
