Which social network is right for your small business?

I can hear the voices of many small business operators in chorus:

“No social network is right for my small business”.

“We don’t have the time, skill or inclination for this digital time waster”.

Or as one popular Australian musician once put it – “I’d rather drink bleach”.

But by now you may well have heard of some small business operators who are using social networking to great advantage and giving them a big head start on their less web-savvy and cumbersome competitors.

So as we have discussed before in these pages, smarter business operators are at least making their first tentative experiments in an attempt to understand how one of their biggest staff distractions can actually work in their favour and generate enquiries, business or support customers.

Here’s a snapshot of which social networks work best for different markets.

Twitter – the least time consuming
For those looking to put a toe in the water in the least amount of time, Twitter will be your social network of choice. Because it is limited to 140 characters of plain text, it only takes a few seconds to post a ‘tweet’ of some interest to your ‘followers’. Once you get your sea legs, you can start trying out different ideas like short-term promotions, announcements and tips.

Myspace – for younger demographics
Those businesses who best benefit from a presence on MySpace include those targetting a younger audience and those whose products or services attract a high degree of passion or interest (or fans). Artists, musicians and writers like the low entry cost and viral capabilities while businesses in the fashion and wine industries have been known to generate valuable promotional benefits from the network. Those providing events have also extracted considerable viral value from this free tool.

Facebook – for older players
A good clue to Facebook’s audience can be traced to its roots as an online equivalent of what is known in the US as your ‘graduation facebook’ – the commemorative booklet that schools and unis produce at the end of each school year. But nowadays Facebook has reached far beyond graduates to adults from all walks of life. Because of its highly personal nature though I wonder how effective it can be to business and how many Facebook users are prepared to give up space on their pages to what effectively constitutes advertising.

LinkedIn – for educated, informed professionals
The beauty of LinkedIn is that it is purpose built for professional business networking unlike MySpace and Facebook. That is, it’s a forum for information affecting your work and career rather than friends and family. To that end it is more likely to lend itself to information from businesses. One of LinkedIn’s great assets is its free ‘group’ tool which allows anyone to create a group to exchange all kinds of information which can also send alerts or summaries to your email inbox. This is invaluable if you want to form or become part of a group that can cross-refer potential suppliers and related information.

YouTube – for information or demonstration rich businesses
Of all the social networks, YouTube is possibly the one that is most business-friendly. Because it is more topic oriented than network oriented, businesses can quite happily add a video and not be seen to be impinging on the ‘personal space’ metaphor of other networks. Therefore advertisements and advertorials are fair game for this network. What’s more, Google and other search engines rate video highly and so will give your video more ‘brownie points’ than other optimisation techniques.

There are of course many other social networks including those that work within a topic or industry niche – in which case it’s likely you already know about them.

While these are all good starting points for those wishing to investigate the phenomenon of social networking, the paradox for small business operators is that best results occur after a considerable investment in time spent practicing and perfecting one’s technique – something that is in very short supply in smaller business.

Has your business benefited from these or other social networks? Tell us about it below.

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Craig Reardon is a leading eBusiness educator and founder and director of independent web services firm The E Team which provide the gamut of ‘pre-built’ website solutions, technologies and services to SMEs in Melbourne and beyond.