Social networking can be the most effective marketing tool with no cost. However, this convenience does not come just like that. To be able to make social networking as an effective tool in helping the development of our business, it needs an effective strategy, a relatively long time, and a lot of energy.

What sort of things you can do to be able to encompass more potential customers out there? Following is tips from Jeffrey Carr, a marketing professor at New York University as summarized from Entrepreneur.com, on how to get more customers through social networking.

Be patient
Carr highlighted the fact that there are still many people who perceived that to build name and reputation in social networking is an easy matter and can be done in a short time. It’s not as simple as typing a few words to update, then naturally your name will be known to many people, and reaps many customers or new relations.

Actually, Carr continued, it takes a relatively long and sustained effort to build credibility in cyberspace. And you have to dedicate time little by little every day to be able to emerge and are known by more people. If you use Twitter, then Carr suggested to having a blog or website as a landing page. This landing page serves as a ‘home’ for all our business activities in cyberspace because of the social networking usually have limitations to be able to load our activities. But if you focus on Facebook, you must determine how much time and frequency to be able to update the status or interact with the visitors of your Facebook page.

Provide benefits
In build a name and credibility in social networking to attract customers, it takes the value/benefits that could be offered to visitors. Provide useful free content, that form of information or messages that are useful for people who read on Twitter, Facebook, or blog. You must provide content that has benefits for the visitor who reads the site.

The next issue which should be a concern for small and medium-sized businesses who want to use the social networks effectively is how to package the information that is useful to look as attractive as possible for visitors.

Be selective
In the social networking, people often experience disorientation. They are less recognize the characteristics of each social networking service and blindly bombarded with information that actually less beneficial to users of social networking. We can take examples such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Both of them, even though the same social networking service, has a different target audience. Facebook more targeted to young people who like to interact, while LinkedIn is more lead to the professionals who want to expand their business network.

According techcrunch.com, social networks also recognize the dominance in each different territory. Friendster still dominates in the Philippines. Orkut has a loyal user base in India and Brazil. Hi5.com is popular in Latin America, except Brazil. Facebook is dominating Australia, Indonesia, North America (U.S. and Canada), most of South America. Meanwhile, China became the center of the dominance of QQ. MySpace is still entrenched in the U.S. Internet users in South Korea like Cyworld social networking. In Central Asia, the number of Maktoob users is very high. And Japan crowded by Mixi users. Therefore, you must be smart to choose, and not just using social networking without knowing which social networks that became the gathering ‘nest’ of your potential customers.

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