How do you decide what social network to use to accomplish your marketing or busines

Picking the right social network for audience and message is a complicated task that can make or break your efforts. Also how you build your networks on these sites will greatly affect the outcome of your networking initiatives.

The best social networking site is the best social site for you and your customers. Not personal preference - twitter is better for an international or national audience and facebook is better for local audience.

Small world networks have two characteristics that when balanced properly, let messages move through the network effectively. Small groups are densely connected. In small groups the best pattern of communication is that everyone can connect with everyone. In a cluster of 5 people there are 10 connections – if one person from the group drops out – none of the other links would be disrupted. This type of connection appears on facebook.

Twitter uses a hybrid of connections between dense and sparse networks. Let the small groups connect tightly together and the large groups are made up of the smaller groups within them. Allows the advantage of a tight connection on the small scale and a loose connection on the larger scale allowing for an efficient but robust network.

The communication and the connections on the two sites are very differently and they cannot be compared easily. What you need to figure out is, who your target audience is and how you want to connect with them. How interconnected you want the people you are connected with to be. The more connected your audience is to each other the better you will be able to network and facilitate networking within your network.

How do you decide what social network to use to accomplish your marketing or business goals?

 

i use everything possible that is free as a means to market. i do agree they are two different sites but by using them both then you have to see results otherwise you are doing it all wrong and need to take a step back and re-evaluate

 

Since I do a lot of video blogging, I have to have a network that allows for the uploading of videos - or allows my youtube account to be linked to my social networking site.

The video factor is one way that I measure a social networking community.

I like to upload my own pictures - that are watermarked with my website name. So one of my requirements is that the site have a picture gallery.