One of the most important rules in marketing your business is that you go where your target market is. With the growing popularity of online social networking websites, it’s a little wonder that more and more businesses are looking for ways to take advantage of the millions of members of these sites. With the use of several widely available tools and networking tactics, you will find that marketing your products or services through this medium is not that hard to do.

Make Friends before Making Money
One of the most common misconceptions of businessmen in marketing their products and services through this medium is considering social networks as just place to post their advertisements on. Contrary to popular belief, posting advertisements that look too much like advertisements are not very effective in this medium. As these social networking sites serve as friend-finder platforms, it is often better to maximize its intended function in order to successfully market your products.

Because of this, you have to start from scratch and collect friends as you go along. This may sound a bit hard to do at first but keep in mind that having a great number of friends in your network is the best way for your offers to be noticed. This doesn’t mean, however, that you are going to flood the bulletin boards with your products ads right after collecting your friends. Instead, it is advisable to develop real relationships and friendships with those who have become your friends by helping them with their concerns, posting your blogs, sending your testimonials, etc. This way, you can be sure that when you offer your product and services to them, they will be interested and you will have more chances of getting sales.

Thankfully, these social networking platforms offer a way to make your task easier by giving you search options in which to limit your potential friends to those who might be interested in your particular product or service. If you have a pet shop for example, you might want to limit your members search to those people who love pets. Similarly, if you are a car salesman, you might like to look for those people who are of working age rather than those still in college. In social networking sites, you can search by limiting your search criteria to members’ hobbies, interests, location, organizations and more. This will help you limit and focus your marketing efforts towards people who are in your target market.

Share Information
Blogging is a great way to reach out to people who might be interested in your service. Remember though that members of social networking websites are not actively looking for products and services so your advertisements would probably be not as effective as you might think.

Instead, try to post blogs that are informative and interesting. These blogs may not convince them outright to buy your products, but you will definitely stand out as someone who knows about this particular product. Thus, you will be one of the persons he or she will approach when considering a purchase in this product category.

Internet Surfers’ Choice
This factor may be more important than you think as more and more search engines are integrating the voice of the internet users in how it ranks the websites. Today, you can see this through social bookmarking wherein internet users can bookmark their favorite sites through an online bookmark website, social search engines and social driven content wherein the users’ preferences and outlooks are given importance in ranking the websites. Users of social networking sites are given the right to vote on how relevant websites or articles are in their search. All these sites are easily accessible and membership is usually free.

With these new set of tools, you can effectively market your products and services to the millions of social networking users.

It is no surprise that social networks are some of the most frequently visited websites on the internet. This also means that the majority of internet users all end up in these central locations, and is great if you are looking to make money. Here are three ways you can make money via social networks:

1. Advertising. Whether on FaceBook, MySpace or whatever (except Twitter), you can make money from advertising. Whether you want to handle advertising for another company, and charge them a fee, or you want to advertise your own services, this is a great way to make money online. FaceBook ads are especially targeted, because they know a lot about their users and target down the demographic to exactly what you are looking for.
2. Developing Apps. Apps are the new craze on social networks. If you are app developer, there are many ways you can make money. One way to do this is to develop apps and place advertising on the app. Whether from Google AdSense or from private advertising, you can make a lot of money from Apps. You can also get your app sponsored if you find the right company, and they can pay you to develop the apps.
3. Lastly, you can sell items on sites like FaceBook. Use FaceBook marketplace to find some junk and sell it. This is the quickest and easiest way to make money using a social network: selling stuff.

If you get creative, there are countless ways to make money using a social network. All you have to keep in mind is to spread the word and get the information out to as many people possible. The more traffic, the more money!

One of the great things about social networks is the friendliness it has towards artists. Soundclick and MySpace were the first to really be artist-friendly, but FaceBook tagged along afterwards. As artists, promotion is key. To gain fans, you must make sure that your work is out there and easily accessible. Social networks made it easy for artists to put their stuff out there to the public, and fans were able to pass it on to other fans, creating a chain reaction.

The first social network you should sign up as an artist for is MySpace. Whether you are an actor, musician, comedian, fashion designer, or whatever, MySpace is the first social network to sign up for. You can create your profile, put your portfolio/demo/reel up and start befriending like-minded people. This will help you network and get your name out there.

The second social network to sign up for is twitter. Once you are on twitter, you can start following people you admire, as well as start gaining followers. On twitter you can make announcements and get to know your fans better through micro-blogging. It is important that in this day you start a twitter account.

Lastly, make a FaceBook fan page. A FaceBook fan page will help you gather all your fans and act as a portfolio of your work. Your fans can see each other, befriend each other, and make your buzz bigger. It also helps you get to know your fans better and in the long run will help you with marketing.

Frequently update all of your social network profiles and stay active in the community. Engage in discussions with your fans and get to know them, this will help you make your buzz bigger and create loyal fans.

Make sure that on each social network profile, you provide a link to your other profiles. This will help you gain friends in all of your profiles and help you make your buzz bigger.

MySpace is awesome, and was awesome even before Tila Tequila made it famous! It is really catered to the individual more than the company. I’ve had a MySpace account since 2005, and was addicted. Then FaceBook and all these other social networks came along, so I started spreading my time out across these networks and found that MySpace had a lot of strengths in many areas. Here are 4 reasons to use MySpace:

1. If you are any type of artist, MySpace is for you! You can put samples of your work on your MySpace page and you can connect with countless like-minded individuals!
2. You are a company looking for some inexpensive talent. If you need a musician do make you a jingle, or a aspiring filmmaker to film you a commercial, MySpace is the place to be! You can find tons of artists and look through them to pick and choose which one you want to go with.
3. You are a company who wants to promote a product. MySpace Groups can help you create a product page full of information, and invite people to that group.
4. You are a blogger looking to network easily. You can post your blogs on MySpace and connect with friends. This will make your blogs very interactive and the community will be able to take part in them. Also, with MySpace bulletin boards, it is easy to blast information to all your friends. Think of Twitter, but with longer messages!

MySpace is especially useful for the artists, but is also useful for companies. Connect with people via MySpace!