Social Networks in the Modern World

Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, Myspace, they are all great websites with millions of visits every day. In recent months all of these companies have started to produce some features aimed at companies and brands helping them to get their word out. This means that there are hundreds of new ways to tell your prospective clients what you are doing at that very moment.  We have started using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for ourselves and some of our clients, this has been a great success and has allowed us to generate new clients and new interest in the company.

Twitter

Twitter is a great little site, well I say little, it gets over 100 people joining the site every day, with well over 5 million accounts world wide, it has become quite a phenomenon. The site simply asks ‘What’s happening?’ and allows you to sent a ‘tweet’ of 140 characters to anybody who wishes to follow you. At this very moment, according to TweeSpeed Twitter is averaging 26304 tweets per minute. That is pretty amazing!

Twitter also has an API which allows developers to create applications, websites, mobile apps and more to integrate Twitter, you might have seen some of this around our site with our streams, and we also use a few different programs, on our iPhones and Desktops to keep us updated with Twitter and post to it.

So what do we use Twitter for? Well we use it to keep people updated with the company, post links to new blog posts, and also make new friends. It also helps us to update our clients on any server problems, new hints and tips and any offers we have on at the moment. It is an incredible platform and we highly recommend it to our clients who are looking to expand their business.

Follow us on Twitter here >> www.twitter.com/XFire_Design

Facebook

Facebook has been around for a while now, started in a student house to keep in contact with the rest of his class at school. It soon became a world wide success. The site boasts on it’s own statistics page that it has over 350 million active users. That is actually a crazy number, impossible to get your head around it if you think about it. It also states that the average user spends 55 minutes on the site each day, this is also an impressive figure. So with all that user presence it is not surprising that many major companies have joined the site recently to promote their products and services.

Facebook allows a company to create a page, which then allows users to become fans of your company, find out what it is about, get updates, blog information, upload pictures, give reviews and a lot more. This tool means that a start up company can quickly get new clients, and build up a great online reputation. The site also makes it really easy to create personalised adverts, which will be displayed allowing users to join your page and tell them who else is joining. This ads come in quite cheap for the amount of exposure you gain.

Our Facebook page is relatively new, but we use a service call TwitterFeed to send all of our Tweets to our Facebook page. This means that both of the networks are in sync in keeping our ‘fans’ informed. We hope to grow the page and include more information very soon, it will become a great resource.

Visit our Facebook page here

YouTube

YouTube was developed in 2005, by a few employees of PayPal who wanted to share some videos of a family dinner. Over the years, and a nice acquisition by Google Inc. it now reports that 20 hours of video are uploaded every minute to it servers. Millions of viewers and registered users view thousands of hours of video every hour, with millions of comments being made on the videos each day it is easy to see why it is such an important network for companies to get in on.

We have had a YouTube ‘Channel’ for a while now, we use it to host some of the videos on the Manchester Cathedral Visitor Centre site. We are starting to use it more and more now though, with ideas of instruction guides for our services, help with our client area and for promotion.

Visit our YouTube Channel Here >> www.youtube.com/user/XfireDesign

We are starting to roll out more Social Networking solutions to our clients everyday, so if you would like a hand or some advice to get you started then get in touch!

That’s all for now.

J