Here are a few basic reasons to use these social networks for your business:

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social network.  Business professionals can create an online resume and historical business profile that is shared with other business professionals within the network.  You can recommend business professionals and create contacts to share information.  LinkedIn Answers allows you to ask questions to 200 of your immediate contacts, gather answers over a week time frame and then rate the responses.  You can also get rated for the value of your recommendations and answers to others questions and showcasing your own business knowledge.  This in turn will become a testimonial for your profile.  Businesses can list their own company in the LinkedIn Company Directory for free.  Your profile and team members' profiles can be added to the listing for a full company review.

Facebook is a socializing network originally created for individuals and opened up for business about two years ago.  It is constantly evolving to meet the needs of the 500 million active users today.  Whether to use a Personal Account vs. a Business Account has been questioned and is not migrated automatically.  Profiles are for individuals and Pages are for business.  Facebook is significantly changing functionality for business and is only available on pages, not profiles.  Measuring and analyzing traffic is currently only available on pages.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service.  Tweets are text based posts under 140 characters.  Twitter offers a mapping utility to offer links to other businesses in your geographic area as well as worldwide and based on category of business or social nature.  It is great for announcing sales and deals that are time driven, updating breaking news or events and sharing and tweeting and following and being followed by other tweeters.  Creating and building a following takes time and attention.  To be able to connect with customers or potential customers is dependent on who is following you and building an avid following.

 
Save time by integrating with your website:

Customers ask us on a regular basis how to integrate my website with my Facebook page, Twitter account. or other social networks like LinkedIn.   Maybe you want to pull your social network content to your website.  The process can be handled many ways, and the tools used will also depend on your websites architecture.  It is also helpful if you have some kind of article or page syndicator making RSS feeds of your website content.

Once you have that process in place, you can subscribe to various tools to read your RSS feed and place it in your twitter and Facebook accounts.  Most content management systems have other tools to link fans, friends and other social networking areas on your website as well.

There are lots of tools out there, but you must always realize that there isn't always a single best one.  You may have to try them out for ease of use, options available on how they display the feeds, frequency and ability to link back to your site.

Directing visitors to your site from these sources give you the ability to reach an audience that may never have come to your company website, but was directed from these social network pages.

Contact us today to see how we can help you integrate your social networking tools from your website at 815-223-1052.