What is Social networking? – This is the term that covers online communities like facebook, myspace, bebo where people network with friends and businesses, or just with people who share a similar interest to you.

How you can use social networking to promote your business – You can create a profile for your business and begin using Events, Fan Pages and Groups to promote your business, let people know about things you have planned, sales that are on, sponsorships and charity fundraising that you have been involved with. Yoy can send out news updates about events, new products etc to draw more people into your website.

You can build more of a relationship with your customers by speaking to them, answering questions and finding out what they like and dislike, interacting in this way with your customers makes them feel appreciated and they feel that there opinions matter. You are able to perform market research that leads to brand loyalty by giving your customers exactly what they want.

Paid For Advertising – Many social networking sites offer paid for advertising. Advertising is focused on user demographics rather than search phrases. Allowing a businesses to target users based on a number of criteria such as age, sex, education and interests.

Web 2.0 is a buzz phrase for user interactivity on the Internet, this is a marketing term as much as a technical design or programming term and is short hand for allowing feedback and other forms of interactivity on a website.

You may be familiar with many forms of web 2.0 with out realising it, if you have used Ebay or Amazon then the feedback or review pages are basically web 2.0 content. 

New applications and technology that allow users with little technical knowledge to create their own webpages or submit content to existing websites, good examples of this include blogs, you can create a blog and update it as often as you like with little or no technical knowledge, you do not need to worry about such things as hosting or FTP, if you can use a word processing package, such as word then you can have your own blog.

Social Networking, Social Bookmarking, Customer Reviews, Blogs, Wikis, RSS feeds are all common uses for web 2.0 and all allow interactivity between the user of the website and the website itself, this can be great for content generation and sharing ideas or for leaving feedback and conducting customer research.

Social networking and social book marking sites allow people with similar interests to get together in groups and discuss the subjects and products they are interested in.

This can be of use if you are marketing your products and services on-line as you can also join these groups.

You can find out what people are talking about and what they are looking for when it comes to your products. This will help you with your keyword research and with producing tools or information to attract new visitors to your site.

When using these sites, you must be careful not to appear ‘spammy’ and just out to promote your site.

You should offer help and advice to members of the group and become recognised as the expert in your field. This will result in not only more visitors but also visitors who trust you and are ready to buy from you.