Tell all your friends and have them tell their friends – because that’s what social networking is all about, passing information back and forth the between friends, family, and business associates.
Social networking is all about friends – real ones and virtual ones – and it is also an important real estate marketing idea.
Social Networking is about Sharing
Social networking lets you create a list of friends and then share things within them. Things like what you’re doing and thinking pictures and movies you’ve taken, events you are attending, even web pages and online articles you find interesting. In return, your friends share the same with you. Then end result is a giant online community.
Social Media sites are websites, services and platforms that people use to share experiences and opinions with each other. This includes social networks, social bookmarkings, blogs, microblogs and other forms of online communities.
Social Networking is two-way, conversational in nature. Requires both consumption and creation. You not only consume messages sent by others, you create your own messages that others consume. It is a participatory activity, not just a spectator sport.
How many networking activities enable you to engage your customers in active conversation? That’s where online social networking shines, making it a really valuable real estate marketing idea.
Social Networking has been around since the 1970s
- BBS’s Bulletin Board Systems were private online discussion forums, hosted on a single computer and assessed by their computers via a dial-up telephone connections, 1970s
- CompuServe 1979-2009
- Prodigy 1984-2001
- America Online 1985 – today
- Personal blogs 2000-today
- Flickr and Photobucket early 2000s
- Social networking as we know it today was born in 2003 when Friendster combined many of these online community features into the first large scale social networking site, introducing the concept of ‘friends’ and ‘friending’
- Facebook launched in 2004 and now has over 2 billion million users, surpassed myspace in April 2008.
- Social Networking is about interacting using public posts, private communication, event calendars, community based games and applications. It is a way of being social without necessarily being personal.
Here are just a few examples of who is Social Networking today…
- Fastest growing group today, 45 & older age group.
- Business colleagues for professional networking
- Friends talking online
- Singles wanting to meet and match up
- Classmates needing study partners and homework advice
- Hobbyists looking for others who share their interests
- People looking for long-lost friends
- Musicians, actors, celebrities connecting with fans
- Media Sharing – Flickr and youtube
- Virtual Communities – Second Life
- Social Review sites – Yelp
More Social Networking marketing ideas…
A Blogger makes a personal connection with his readers and a community is formed when those readers comment on posts. Blogging is a smart real estate marketing idea, right up there with tweeting and social networking posts.
Microblogging is a very short blog post to a group of subscribers – as in Twitter with 100 million users and Tumblr with 3 million users. Businesses use them to make commercial announcements, also known as microblog marketing.
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