How can networks be used as a promotional tool

How has networking helped your business? Want to learn more about networking? Download this FREE guide:. Contact us today. For more great tips visit our website www. Preferred method of contact: Phone Email. Subscribe to our free email newsletter. Here are some ways that networking can benefit your business.

Here are some tips to help you network at events: Network with potential clients: You should attend networking events that your potential clients or customers would attend. For example if your target market is small businesses, then participate in networking events for small business owners. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana cuadernos. How to cite this article.

Are you a photographer? Again, real estate people need home photography, landscapers need them too. Or how about offering everyone professional headshots for socials or websites? Find someone you could help. There is a law of reciprocity that says that if you do a good deed for a person, they will feel obliged to return the good deed back to you. Use this theory when it comes to networking. There is value in finding and making friends here as well.

These are people who are in business, just like you and have that specific kind of insight that only business owners can have. That's why the people at these events are not just invaluable to your business, but also to you as the entrepreneur.

These people have gone through the same challenges, successes, and journeys as you. They can relate, they can offer support in ways friends and family can't, they can teach you and give resources that would only benefit another business owner. This is the power of networking. How can you make the most of your networking time? Time is the most valuable commodity you have, and if you are spending it at networking events you want to use it effectively.

If you go to an industry networking event can you effectively get sales from people in your industry? They could be handy for overflow work.

Do some research or at least be prepared with a goal in mind of the types of opportunities that are available to you, and how you can offer value to others too. Remember, it's a give-and-take situation that requires both parties to give value.

Subscribe to your local council business network or investigate small business groups on social media. These types of groups will advertise networking events for you to go to. There may be a cost, but you could get some great referral work through them. Do you want to join a networking group? There are a few brand names out there that run regular groups for businesses. Joining up with a business coaching and training community, like what we do at The Entourage , can also connect you to other like-minded business owners.

The best part about joining a coaching network like ours, the people you meet have made that decision to take their business higher, they are motivated to learn and grow, and can motivate you too. We often hold events for the public, such as the upcoming Unconvention event. Use these people to refer work to, use them as a knowledge base to help you. This situation confirms the fact that the borderlines between online social networks and e-commerce sites are more blurry every day.

As explained in the previous section, online social networks can be used for e-marketing, yet e-commerce is nowadays the premiere tool for such activity.

Three major differences can be found between online social networks and e-commerce sites; however as explained in this section, such differences are not insurmountable. In first place, there is a clear difference in the purpose of online social networks and e-commerce sites.

On the one hand, the purpose of online social networks is supporting and creating social networks, which ultimately favor the development of the human web, as already explained. On the other hand, e-commerce pursues the use of electronic technologies to exchange goods and services [9]. So, while online social networks are aimed at communicating and maintaining social relationships, i.

However, in spite of this clear difference, we have to recognize that economic activities are essential part of life, and thus complementary to social activities. In fact, "no aspect of business is more social than selling" [20].

Furthermore, economic decisions are often influenced by relatives or friends [52]. Therefore, we can argue that dividing social interactions from economic and business transactions is artificial. Second, the criteria for success of online social networks and e-commerce sites are different: number of contacts, in the case of online social networks effectiveness , versus quantity and volume of transactions efficiency , in the case of e-commerce.

Nevertheless, the effectiveness of the online social networks may contribute to the efficiency of e-commerce. This is due to the fact that one of the most important factors for the operation of an e-commerce site, particularly for small and medium enterprises SME , is the awareness of the site.

This is a precondition for customers to be able to buy products through an e-commerce site. Although Internet search engines can help to locate e-commerce sites, the rapid and constant development of new sites on the Internet makes it increasingly more difficult to properly position a website in these engines. Appearing first in the results of a search engine is likely to increase four times the traffic of a site in comparison to another appearing on second position [56].

Consequently, sites that already have a large number of users and also high traffic, such as is the case with the major online social networks, provide significant benefits to host or promote e-commerce sites, particularly for SMEs.

Finally, online social networks are based on software offered by intermediaries while e-commerce sites are usually developed by the same firms. Nonetheless, this is a purely circumstantial situation. Since e-commerce involves well-established procedures, it is relatively easy to anticipate the expected functionality of an e-commerce site.

This facilitates the use of existing software to generate e-commerce sites software as a product , for example osCommerce Site 20 or Magento Site 18 , or the use of existing software platforms for creating virtual stores using predefined e-commerce services software as a service , such as Amazon Webstore Site 4 or Yahoo Store Site The previous evolution of e-commerce is further enhanced by the use of mega e-commerce sites platform as a service , e.

Therefore, the above situation favors the use of online social networks as platforms for electronic commerce. This evolution is consistent with the Web 2. Social commerce, explained before, clearly exemplifies this trend. Based on the market perspective, introduced in the previous section, we can claim that online social networks and e-commerce sites are not substitutes, but rather complementary tools for e-marketing.

Due to the large number of users and high traffic that many online social networks have, these networks provide ideal conditions for advertising brands and products. This situation promotes a virtual integration between online social networks and e-commerce sites, which is achieved through links to the e-commerce site of a company in ads or messages sent using online social networks, or through e-commerce tools, such as Payvment and Ecwid, which expand the capabilities of online social networks to e-commerce.

Furthermore, platforms for developing e-commerce sites also provide this type of integration, such as is the case with e-Bay Stores to Go Site 7 which allows the integration of e-commerce stores created using e-Bay's model with online social networks. On the other hand, we can argue based on the community perspective, also introduced in the previous section, that virtual integration between online social networks and e-commerce sites is likely to proceed in the near future to the next level: physical integration.

Although different types of virtual communities can be distinguished, it is artificial to separate social from economic or business interests, as previously indicated. Business communities have been evolving into social communities and social communities into business communities. Social commerce is a result of this evolutionary process.

From the standpoint of online social network operators, the evolution of their networks into business communities has the inherent advantage of providing revenue, which is needed not only to support the network operations and offer free of charge their core services to the users, but also to fulfill the profit expectations from the investors. The situation currently faced by Facebook, regarding its revenue growth, illustrates this point.

According to Timberg: "[p]art of the answer [to the reduction in Facebook's stock value], say analysts and academics, lies in Wall Street's skepticism of a founding principle of Silicon Valley's culture - that the best way to build a company is to ignore profits in favor of building a huge audience" [50].

Although currently online social network operators have developed pay services for business to advertise and obtain feedback for their products, companies are more willing to pay for e-marketing services based on success and not on prospects for success [53].

In this way, achieving a sale is the ultimate success for a company, and therefore, paying a fee to an online social network operator for enabling a sale would be easier to justify than simply paying for an ad. This lesson was painfully learned by companies during the dot-com bubble. Furthermore, assessing the effectiveness of an ad campaign in an online social network is not easy. Although the number of users is commonly used for this purpose, this number is problematic for several reasons.

First, there is a major difference between registered and active users, that is, users having an account and those using it regularly. Second, fake accounts can be used in Facebook to give likes, distorting the number of real users interested in a company's product or brand pages.

A similar situation occurs with Twitter, where there have been allegations of fake accounts being used to increase the number of followers. According to a recent study by Barracuda Labs, "[f]ake users should be a huge concern to both Facebook and Twitter because of the threat they create to user trust This obviously threatens advertising revenue as organizations begin to question the true visibility and reach of their ad campaigns" [4].

Although fake accounts are mainly created by spambots, i. Users' aversion towards spamming also affects the effectiveness of marketing campaigns through online social networks [24]. There is not still agreement on the advantages of Web 2. Some authors warn about the potential dangers of such applications e. In this sense, Clarke claims that "[a]lthough [the significance of Web 2.

Part of the vacuity, mentioned by Clarke in the previous quote, comes from the fact that Web 2. In this regard, Constantinides and Fountain claim that "in the Web 2. As such, Web 2. In push marketing, companies push their products through mass communication media, such as newspapers, radio and TV.

This is a one-way, non-interactive, mechanism of communication. On the other hand, in pull marketing, consumers pull at their will the product from the marketing channel. According to Harris and Rae, "social networks will play a key role in the future of marketing; externally they can replace customer annoyance with engagement, and internally they help to transform the traditional focus on control with an open and collaborative approach that is more conducive to success in the modern business environment" [25] p.

However, although online social networks offer excellent communication channels for pull marketing, such networks bring alongside communities, thus introducing a new element to the marketing mix: people. Judd [29] has proposed to add people to the traditional four Ps marketing mix framework product, price, promotion, and place introduced by McCarthy [37].

People are at the heart of social networks and online social networks support and reinforce people's networks. Consequently, Web 2.

However, the use of Web 2. The market and community perspectives, previously presented, can be used to address such questions. As of today most of the marketing developments in online social networks has followed the market perspective. Peripheral services related to e-marketing are provided, not as core services but rather as income generation mechanisms to cover expenses and possibly generate profits, which are necessary to provide free social networking services to users.

As previously argued, from a market perspective, online social networks and e-commerce sites are not substitute, but rather complementary marketing tools. Online social networks can be used to reach prospective as well as existing customers. Consequently, as in the case of any market, the demographic characteristics of the network become relevant.

Messages, as part of the social network around a firm, and targeted ad campaigns can be used to attract new customers or to offer products to existing ones. This can be supplemented by viral and conversational marketing. In contrast, the community perspective considers online social networks as virtual communities of individuals. As such, these communities might not only serve purely social, but also economic and commercial purposes.

Therefore, the community perspective fosters integration between online social networks and e-commerce sites into social commerce. This integration might originate from e-commerce site operators, such as Amazon or e-Bay, or from online social network operators, such as Facebook or Twitter. In the first case, motivation for this integration would be to enhance the e-commerce services by providing customer's recommendations and evaluations of products and suppliers.

In the second case, the drive could be to generate additional revenue by charging companies for services that enable business transactions through the Internet. This would become particularly important as the advertisement business model for the online social networks deteriorates. There is evidence that this situation is beginning to occur due to a reduction in ad rates as a consequence of growing competition in digital advertising, and the preference of retailers to target customers directly through their own e-commerce sites or through e-commerce megasites, such as Amazon [50].

Therefore, e-commerce researchers should monitor the developments towards the integration of online social networks and e-commerce sites into social commerce, which undoubtedly will have serious implications for e-commerce, as well as for e-marketing.

The announcement of Gap, Gamestop, J. Penney, and Nordstrom to close their Facebook stores presents evidence of problems with such integration. In this regard, Marsden and Chaney claim that these storefronts were simply clones of the external e-commerce sites, and as such did not provide any "compelling and differentiating reason to shop there" [35] p.

According to these authors, such virtual stores were smaller and slower than the parallel e-commerce sites, without additional convenience. This seems to be another case in which a new technology is used in the same way as a previous one, supporting Turban et al.

Therefore, these Facebook stores did not complement market perspective nor were integrated community perspective with the existing e-commerce sites. While a real integration between online social networks and e-commerce is achieved, companies will have to develop strategies to combine these tools effectively for e-marketing. E-commerce researchers can then assist in this task by providing theoretical perspectives on how this integration should proceed, and also by documenting case studies from companies leading this work Marsden and Chaney [35] discuss some of such cases.

Our appreciation to Dr. We also like to thank the reviewers and editors of JTAER for their valuable comments and suggestions. Site Facebook social commerce applications.

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