There’s lots of opportunities to make money online, and traditionally, it was all based on search engine optimization, or SEO. While that’s still very important, the world is moving social, and social networks in particular are a great way to reach people. Any good marketer now knows to use social networks to sell and run advertising campaigns. There are many ways to make money with Facebook, Twitter and even Google+, and you can learn how to harness that power as well.
First, it’s important to understand that social networks are a marketing tool, they aren’t a vault of money ready to open for you. Before you start your social network endeavors, you need to have a idea for a product or service you want to offer. It could be really simple, like you could advertise an affiliate product, or you could offer a service that you can fulfill using your own skills, like creating graphics for logos, or anything else. You can even go to local businesses, and find out if they have a social media strategy yet, and if not, they could pay you to handle it for them. Once you have the product, and you know the message that you wish to send, you can start getting your own presence on these networks. The important thing to know about social networks is that you need followers, or friends, to listen to whatever message you wish to send.
On Facebook, the key is to have friends. You can add random people as friends, but that’s not what Facebook is meant for. If you add too many people and they flag you as a spammer, you will be blocked for 48 hours. Instead, to gain many friends you should add people you know, then add the people that they know. This way, you have someone in common, and you’re less likely to be blocked. You can keep going that way until the limit of 5,000 friends, and then your message will have a lot of reach. Any time you post a link to your wall, all your friends will see it. If they like it, they can then reshare it as well, so more people see what you wrote. As you can see, this can be very powerful.
Twitter doesn’t work the same way. There, you don’t have two-way connections, anyone can follow anyone else, without them following back. So you need to have a Twitter account and post interesting content. That’s the key to being followed. You can also send direct tweets to people who have a large number of followers and see if they can promote you, but more often than not, the way to get a large following is to post on a regular basis. One good thing about Twitter is there is no maximum of followers. Some people have millions. If you manage it, then any advertising you do will reach all of them.
Finally, Google+ is the latest social network, and also the smallest. It works similarly to Twitter, in that you have followers. One difference however is that people can group these followers into circles, and share those circles. A good way to start using Google+ is to find people who share your interests using the search feature, then see who they follow. Add them, and chances are if you post useful content, they will add you back. Overall, social networks are a great place to promote products and services, but the key is to always surround your message in useful content, something people want to see. If it looks like spam, you won’t get much value out of them, but if you word your posts carefully, you can end up making money.