The Positive and Negatives of Social Networks
There is a lot of positive and negatives about building social networks (mote positives then anything), and the best thing of all if you build a strong social network you can create a very profitable website by far. Which granted all marketers say that community building is the hardest task of all marketing on the internet, or I should say the toughest strategy, but I disagree. I don’t think community building is a hard task, I just think its a time consuming task that takes a lot of patience.
First is first let me get into the positives of building social networks and how they can benefit your brand, or business in general.
Brand Building - You can use social networks to build your brand. You build the community and get every one aware of whats going on and then before you know it people will start talking about it, so it spreads your name vertically all over the web.
Link Baiting and Building - You can use social networks to build links into your website and promote viral content that you can use for links better yet known as link baits, and of course the result of this will be higher search engine rankings ;).
Product Promotion - You can promote your products more effectively by leveraging your communities out.
Monetization -Â People love to do this, you get so much community interest on the website you can start to monetize it whether it being your on ads or an advertisers. If you get a strong enough community built site you can advertise for 2k plus a month easily depending on how much traffic your getting, now just imagine having 10 banners for 2k a month on your site.
Friends - You will meet a lot of people by having a community site, and you can gain more connections very easily.
Leverage - When your site gets built up you have more leverage the harder part is getting it going, but once you get the blog or forum going you can easily create buzz all over the web.
Ok What are the negatives well there really is not to many negatives, but let me go over a few things that could possibly happen.
Controversy - You could accidentally post something that someone gets offended by and I have seen this happen just recently with someone I know pretty well. It created major controversy and brough a lot of negative attention to the this person which is actually a really good person, but I think the other side got a little offensive about what was said.
Thats pretty much it there not to much bad stuff about having a community site, the positives out weigh the negatives by far, but for any one that is doing well sooner or later there going to draw negative attention one way or another and it happens to every body that has something going. Just part of life in general, but for the best part community building websites rock and they rule the web (through social networks anyways).