Web Marketing all-in-one for Dummies®

Chapter 5. Building Your Network

In This Chapter

• Finding and keeping friends

• Expanding your network with questions and answers

• Behaving yourself in social media

To this point in this minibook, I've talked a lot about the mechanics of social media: setting up profiles, talking to your friends and followers, and posting new items. In this chapter, you see how to actually meet and keep friends — and how to deal with the occasional foot-in-mouth incident.

Finding Friends

All social media Web sites work on the principle of friends. In social media, a friend is someone who keeps tabs on what you're doing on that particular site. The mechanism might vary, as you can see in Figure 5-1, but the principle remains the same: More friends means a bigger network, which means more people to pass your message along. That means more people to sell to, of course. But more important, it means you have a larger audience of potential fans of you and your brand. They can tell other folks about you and multiply the number of people you can reach directly and indirectly.

Figure 5.1. Adding friends on Facebook.

• On social networks, such as Facebook or MySpace, friends receive updates when their friends write a note, make a blog post, or take some other action. They can also send messages to each other.

• On bookmarking sites, such as StumbleUpon or Delicious, friends can share bookmarks and pass really interesting bookmarks ...