Social Network

1. Staying Connected

The main purpose of social media is to be able to stay connected to friends and families in today’s fast paced and ever changing worlds. You are able to rekindle old friendships, share family photos, and special events in your life with just about everyone you know, at the same time.

2. Finding People With Common Interests

Social networking is also a great way to meet entirely new people. You can seek out groups that are focused towards your special interests and hobbies and connect with local people that share the same interests. Online and social media dating is almost more common than traditional dating is in today’s world.

3. Invaluable Promotional Tool

Companies, artists, and musicians can reach an impossibly large and diverse amount of people using social media sites. This allows them to promote and market themselves and their products in a way that has never been seen before.

4. Information Spreads Incredibly Fast

Breaking news and other important information can spread like wildfire on social media sites. Important things like recalls, storm information, or missing children are all communicated and taken seriously very quickly.

5. Helps To Catch And Convict Criminals

People often do not think of the consequences of what they post of these social sites. Pictures of themselves doing illegal things, or even bragging posts about crimes they have committed are all things that law enforcement use to persecute these criminals. They also use these sites to identify and solve existing cases.

1. Prospecting on a Social Network :

• The marketing potential of a social network is undeniable. Potentially, it's an enormous database of prospects, and some of those prospects are future customers, future suppliers, or even future employees.

2. Sourcing Talent on a Social Network :

• If your business suppliers or employees use the Internet, social networks are a great place to find them -- cheaply. Consider that a retained search can cost anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars, but a basic membership to, say, LinkedIn is free and for $19 to $50 a month you can buy the right to e-mail any one of millions of its members. Facebook has no membership fees, but discovering information about members requires more active involvement. "A lot of our small and large clients are actively mining networks and identifying potential hires," says Gartner's Austin. Hiring managers also "run through networks of people to get independent confirmation of [a candidate's] skills, capabilities and attitudes."

3. Building Widgets for Social Networking Sites :

• "There are a lot of opportunities to market yourself, your company and add value in your overall business ecosystem through making widgets available."

4. Encouraging Employee Use, Not Abuse, of Social Networking :

• "The best practice around social software is to walk before you run. Allow small pockets of experimentation, to do that you need to make it clear you're not going to punish users who have been out there. You need to make it clear they can share -- user-driven innovation is good, not bad."

5. Building a Custom Social Network for Customers :

• This is a classic build or buy decision. The good news is that available tools for discussion forums and social networks, such as Ning.com, are fairly strong. In Constant Contact's case, the ConnectUp site taps into an existing need of their small and midsize business customers. Says Forrester's Owyang: "Brands should develop their own social network if they are trying to support their customers, embrace them to build better products, or to glean insight from them. On the flip side, they should join existing Web sites to improve marketing, word of mouth or also to learn from communities in their native environment."

6. Building a Custom Social Network for Employees or Suppliers :

• "Socializing is a critical part of getting to know other people, improving working relationships."

7. Building Brand Awareness on a Social Network :

• Most companies dabble at building brand awareness on social networks, but it's also possible to hire a social media or advertising consultant and establish a plan.

“Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.”

“If we are connected to everyone else by six degrees and we can influence them up to three degrees, then one way to think about ourselves is that each of us can reach about halfway to everyone else on the planet.”

“Social networks are more than just repositories for trivial, snap judgments; they are more than merely convenient outlets for mindless joy and outrage. They offer more than the common ground and the solace we may find during culturally significant moments. Social networks also provide us with something of a flawed but necessary conscience, a constant reminder that commitment, compassion, and advocacy neither can nor ever should be finite.”

“Our thoughts, feelings and whereabouts: Food we dish up on plates called photographs and status updates; to feed Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.; beasts with insatiable appetites.”