M5:D20 (D428) Social Networking 101 (Part 2 of 2)

    Why social networking matters
    How to use Twitter to make fitness connections
    Updating your social networking sites from one location
    Increasing positive pressure through the use of social networking
    How to promote your fitness product using social networking

This article is will help you understand and get started with Social Networking.

Why Social Networking Matters

It wasn’t that long ago that we did not even have the internet.  Today almost everyone has the internet in their home.  Social Networking is a major component of the new Web 2.0 that is proliferating society.  The major idea behind Web 2.0 is to enhance creativity, communications, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web.  This is why you see so many news sites allowing comments to be made on their news articles.  Blogs are another piece of Web 2.0 that involves sharing information and allowing comments on that shared information. 

Social networking matters.  It matters because it is the way the new global community is developing.  Sites like eBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, and Skype are enabling us to connect with like-minded people around the world.  It enables you to do more than just retrieve information.  Sites like Myspace and Facebook are exploding because they give you an opportunity to both share information and retrieve the information you want and need.  Failure to get in touch with social networking is going to result in being left behind technology-wise.  Anyone who wants to have an active web presence in the future is going to need to be part of the social networking scene. 

One way to get started is to be sure to link to other people when doing your blog posts.  Reciprocal linking is a key to success in social networking.

It is important to note that email, instant messaging and the telephone do not fall in the Web 2.0 realm because they are not web applications.

How to use Twitter to make fitness connections

In my previous article I spoke about Twitter and explained a little about what it is about.  Below is a screenshot of my Twitter account.  I will attempt to explain what is going on within that screen.

The window above (as best you can see it) gives me the ability to enter a 140 character message (note the big “140” next to the “What are you doing?” text).  Below that you can see pictures and some text.  These are the “tweets” of the people I am actively following.  You will also note that my Twitter page is customized to my own background.  I am following 137 people at the minute and I have 114 people following me.  This means that anytime I send a tweet it goes to 114 people.  Twitter also gives you the ability to send direct messages to anyone that is following you and whom you are following.  This enables you to talk privately with anyone you are following/being followed by.  You can join the Twitter revolution at http://www.twitter.com.

An example of some great fitness professionals you can connect with on Twitter:  Tom Venuto, Marc David, Craig Ballantyne, Scott Tousignant and many others. 

Twitter gives you the ability to share links and pictures as well, all in a 140 character space!  Give it a try and you won’t be sorry.  Just be sure to reciprocate. 

Updating your social networking sites from one location

One of the keys of social networking is getting to know other people.  By doing this you can create mutually beneficial relationships.  Many joint ventures have been born through social networking.  It is an incredible resource.  However, it is difficult to keep multiple sites up to date because it is time consuming.  There are now sites that will enable you to update all your social networking sites at one time.  The two biggest sites for this type of thing are ping.fm and hellotxt.com.  I personally have used both and prefer hellotxt.com.

With hellotxt you can select ahead of time the sites you want updated (I update Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed).  You then type your update status in the box and it gets sent out to all your choices at the same time.  Hellotxt supports a large combination of social networking sites.  See http://www.hellotxt.com to join and for more information.

Ping.fm isn’t much different from hellotxt in features that it provides.  I just found that the mobile interface to hellotxt was faster and since I do alot of updating from cell phone, I chose to stick with hellotxt and not Ping.fm.  I know alot of people who love Ping.fm and use it exclusively. 

Increasing Positive Pressure Thro
ugh the Use of Social Networking

As Adam: RTP 2.0 Blog has consistently stated, there is a need for positive pressure to make accountability work.  There are alot of ways to accomplish positive pressure using social networking.  One way is to occasionally include your blog URL in your tweets on Twitter.  An example of how this can work is a recent photo I uploaded of my son.  I took a photo of Matty playing a Wii game and sent it to Twitpic, a service for providing pictures in your tweets, and within 10 seconds 25 people had already viewed the photo.  Imagine if each time you updated your blog you posted a link to it in Twitter?  What if you just updated your statistics and you posted a link to those in Twitter?  People would begin to visit your blog more often. People who knew nothing about your blog would suddenly be regular readers.  That should increase the pressure in a positive way.

I use Facebook.  I do two things to increase the positive pressure using Facebook:  I post the URL to my blog and I import (automatically) my blog entries.

 
Note that I have my blog URL listed on my Facebook profile (see above).


Note that I have my Facebook settings set to import my blog posts on a regular basis. 

By doing these two things I drive people to my blog.  The URL listing on my Facebook profile has gotten me readers who knew me but didn’t know about my blog.  At the same time, adding my blog posts to my profile keeps them in front of even more people.  This ratchets up the positive pressure on me.

Updating your status with information about your blog is another way to keep the positive pressure high.

Note how Suzette used her status area to update us on her pushup challenge.

Suzette: Quest for Success posted the following status (via Twitter incidentally) about her pushups and included a link to her blog.  This is an example of using the status information to keep the positive pressure high.

How to Promote Your Fitness Product Using Social Networking

This is one of the trickiest parts of the entire issue we are discussing.  Through social networking you can build a rather gigantic group of people that you communicate with on a regular basis.  You should take the time to develop some sort of connection with these people.  At the point that you are ready, you can start to advertise your product using Twitter and Facebook.  You can update the two places at one time using hellotxt.  The idea is that your audience will be more receptive because they’ve gotten to know you.  They will hopefully have an appreciable amount of trust in you.  These things can only benefit the launch and future sales of your product.

Web 2.0 has a huge advertising and marketing component to it.  People do videos and then post them for others to see.  In these videos they promote their product.  There is no other way you can get your product in front of so many people so quickly.  Social networking is the key to quick distribution of information, including marketing materials.  You can even market products as an affiliate using social networking sites.  Just be careful.  Don’t turn into a spammer or you will lose followers on Twitter and friends on Facebook.

I personally get disgusted when someone asks me to join a group on Facebook and after I join I start getting several messages a day advertising a product.  It is annoying and I wind up leaving the group immediately.

Matty’s Workout Log: