Public Social Networks

As a Marketing person Public social contacts is very essential to make good sales and achieve company targets.

External public social networking services, such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Friendster, can be valuable sales, marketing, and support tools. These services comprise extensive networks of users who are self-organized into groups and communities.

Users establish connections directly with other users to form a personal friends network. Users also join groups and communities that are organized around attributes such as products, lifestyles, entertainment, institutions, politics, and geographic locations.

Social network users also build their own extensive demographic profiles by connecting to dozens or hundreds of affinity groups, not just connecting to other users. This self-segmentation phenomenon is why social networks present marketers and advertisers with such a potentially lucrative audience for promoting goods and services.

There are several ways an organization can benefit from using public social networks, including:

* HR recruiting
* Product marketing
* Services outreach
* Promotional application
* Market intelligence
* Professional networking

Companies are exploiting public social networking sites for valid business purposes. However, a lack of enterprise-class controls makes management of users akin to herding cats. By adopting strong policies for business use of public social networks, small and midsize businesses can maximize value and safeguard against inappropriate connections between personal and business contacts.