Facebook is a website that can be accessed from almost any device that can connect to the Internet. It is a website that allows you to add your friends to your online profile and share updates about what you are doing, what you are reading or where you are. You can then connect to organisations, groups and networks of people with similar interests (e.g. People that love drinking Coca-Cola).

You can then become a “fan” of businesses and organisations and share your support with everyone in your network. This is the most interesting aspect from a business and marketing point of view. By utilising Facebook’s fan system, you can have a central means of accessing you clients where they are spending their time online.

Why Should You use it?

A clear and interesting statistic which sums up exactly why your business should have a presence on Facebook:

“The extent of Facebook’s reach in Australia – it accounts for 29 per cent of all time spent online by Australians – has led to research group Nielsen defining the trend as “Facebook Time” and “Non Facebook Time”.” – The Age

(http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/woe-is-bebo-site-to-shut-down-in-australia-20091119-iox3.html)

If Australian’s are spending that much time firstly online, and secondly visiting the one website for almost a third of their total Internet usage, it is pure common sense for your organisation to be there too.

The other main reason why your company should appear there is the fact that it allows you to communicate with your clients. By leaving them a message, a personalised thankyou, or alerting them with special deals, you will give them a sense of something bigger – they become an evangelist of your brand.

Flickr is probably the world’s most innovative and popular photo sharing website in the world. It is owned by Yahoo! and has both a free and paid service for you to utilise.

Flickr sums up their service perfectly on their website:

“Flickr is the WD-40 that makes it easy to get photos or video from one person to another in whatever way they want.”

Not only is it used to upload and store photos online but it also allows them to be tagged, put into galleries and then shared with family and friends.

Businesses have also discovered that rather than host the images on their own servers, they can use Flickr as their image database and hence their websites pull images from Flickr rather than where the rest of the website is hosted. Clever isn’t it (we will come back as to how you can do that in a future lesson).

Why Should You Use it?

Businesses (and individuals) should be using this service because it allows you to manage all your organisation’s photos in one safe and secure portal.

Particular industries that benefit the most are:

• Photographers
• Graphic Designers
• Printing Companies
• Wedding Planners
• Event Management
• Charities
• Modelling

Flickr also integrates seamlessly with many of the other social networks (Facebook. Blogs, Twitter, etc) by getting your web developer to insert Flickr specific pieces of code onto your existing website.

Most of all, you can access it also anywhere you are in the world from almost any device with the ability to take photos and connect with the Internet.

LinkedIn is an online social network purely for professional and business networking relationships. Contrasting it with Facebook, Facebook specialises in purely friendship and family relationships. There are over 55 million members and you can interact with those in your professional network as well as search out other professionals that can help you improve your business – whether it be partnerships, generating new business or looking for potential new employees.

Why should you use it?

There are a few key reasons as to why your organisation and the professionals that make it up should be actively participating on LinkedIn:

• It allows you to store all your professional relationships separate to those that make up your personal circle.
• It allows you to upload your resume (CV) and provide you with creditability for your personal brand
• By having an established personal brand, LinkedIn helps your organisation’s reputation that it is made up of professional people.
• You can ask questions to your network regarding business matters and have them contribute to helping you solve a particular issue that you are facing.
• Locate other trusted service providers to help you grow your business.
• Monitor the status of your competitors.

Each of these points will be further explained in later lessons.

Welcome to the introductory Twitter course! With Twitter usage growing significantly over the last 2 years, it has cemented itself into one of the top 20 websites that are visited everyday on the Internet. Because of its large and active user base and the fact it can be accessed in almost every country of the world, it is extremely likely your current customers and potential customers are already active on the service. Hence, it is imperative for your organisation to be present and involved in the conversation.

What is it? According to Twitter itself

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages. People write short updates, often called “tweets” of 140 characters or fewer. These messages are posted to your profile or your blog, sent to your followers, and are searchable on Twitter search.

Basically tweets are very similar to SMS, with the only key difference is that rather being sent to one individual, the update (tweet) is sent to everyone that has elected to “follow” or monitor your Twitter updates. As mentioned, these tweets can also be included into your company or personal website or any other network you choose to include on the Internet. Why should businesses use Twitter? Due to the flexibility of the network, it can be used in multiple ways to improve your business, whether to drive sales or to increase awareness of a particular cause. Below we will outline a few of the key reasons:

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• The incredible amounts of traffic – As you can see from this Alexa traffic report, Twitter has exploded onto the Internet in the last 12 months, and is ranked number 14th in Alexa’s traffic data in the entire world. With actual real user numbers kept close to the chest of the company, this report from Tech Crunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/29/end-of-speculation-the-real-twitter-usage-numbers/ puts the number at approximately 1.3 million in 2008. The real benefit then comes is that once people share information that they find on your website on Twitter, a percentage of that traffic can reach your website which you would not have attained any other way.
• Two-way communication – the whole idea of Twitter is to reach out and communicate with other individuals all over the world. There is a strong community in many circles on the network, with users often searching out and supplying answers to other’s questions. Not only that, it allows businesses to listen and respond to feedback regarding the business itself, a product, or a service.
• Increasing your business network – Twitter allows you to connect with industry and thought leaders, people you would never have access to with any other medium. By interacting with these high profile individuals, it could create new business opportunities.
• The Search – Found at http://search.twitter.com, you can use it much the same as any other regular search engine. The benefit of looking at Twitter search however is the fact you can see only the thoughts of people in real time as opposed to all the other information kept by the typical search engines.
• Your primary means of communicating your business’s updates and announcements – Rather than performing costly mail outs or outsourcing to a PR company, you can broadcast on Twitter for no cost and achieve almost a similar result.

Continue onto the next lesson to see how to register an account.