Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon of saying how important participating in social networks is for online marketing. Jane copland from SEOMOZ article how to leverage social media to market your brand provides an excellent article about the different social media sites. Me on the other hand, I seem to be a bit slower in jumping the that band wagon. In a recent discussion with a client who is looking to establish a community around his site, the marketing team was pushing us real hard to include participating in some of these networks as part of the strategy we will implement. While I think it is important not to ignore these sites when coming up with a marketing strategy, I think business must proceed with caution before jumping into them. With almost 30 different social networking sites out there, it’s important to choose the right one for your business. If you participate in the wrong site, your effort might all go to waste.

Before using any tool to market your business, you need to know how this tool is going to help you achieve your final objective. For example, if you are a B2B company that targets Fortune 1000 companies, I see very little benefit from jumping into using myspace. Although this view is not very popular, I was glad to hear the same view echoed by Greg Verdino. Greg did an excellent job in explaining how and which social networks a business should approach. He divided social networking sites into two different categories:

• one is social sites built based on interest,
• the other is social sites built based on practice.

So, Myspace for example is social site that gathers users and communities based on interest. Linkedin on the other hand is a social networking site that gathers people based on practice. Greg’s theory is that B2B companies will benefit the most from marketing and focusing on social sites that are practice based. People come to a site such as linked in looking for advice from peers and trying to network with other business minded users. Also, those who are active in Linkedin are generally older and more professional than users of Myspace.

So, while I am not opposed to Myspace or sites like it in a marketing mix, I always tell client that we need to make sure that using social media outlets will produce the best results for their dollar investment.

Important resources:
Also, before you jump into creating a profile on these sites, make sure to learn about simple rules for social media marketing and how to use social media for B2B business.

What do you think? Do you use sites like Myspace or Facebook to promote your business?