The potential of social networks for businesses?

I'm really interested to see the potential of social networks for businesses. Initially, the benefit for businesses to hold an online social media presence is that they are able to interact with an incredibly large, established community. Furthermore, businesses are able to tap into the networks based on what benefits their business.
For example, a business dealing with the music industry would be more likely to join Myspace as opposed to joining Couchsurfing.

So the question is when does a business know which social network to join?

There are hundreds upon thousands of social networks out there, each holding a community as different as each other. While the major social network Facebook is now firm at the top of the hierachy, there has been a lot of buzz about the growing trend of Twitter.

The latest research seems to show that though Twitter's membership has skyrocketed in the past year, the actual usage of Twitter per day does not even come close to that of an average Facebook user. Additionally, geographically the majority of Twitter's users come from the USA.

So what benefit can business gain from Twitter? Recently, Twitter announced that it would allow business to advertise on Twitter signalling a strategy for the company to earn some revenue from it's social platform. The power for businesses is that Twitter already categorises Tweets based on the hash-tag technology.

If a company that sells clothes online searches for tweets with the phrase 'online shopping' they are able to directly communicate with users via Direct Messages, advertising their product in a way which they would usually have to pay thousands of dollars for.

Whilst the social network marketing phenomena still seems young, there is a lot of confusion for businesses to really understand the value of the time investment. What i think is required is an understanding of your audience as well as adding a human touch to the marketing effort on social networks, rather than sticking with the corporate direct sell you would otherwise try to employ.

I work for a company called UbiqueApps - definitey worth checking out.

http://www.ubiqueapps.com/