Social Networking: What Every Business Needs to Know

The question most business owners are asking in 2004 isn’t “how do I use social networking,” it’s “should I bother with this at all.” That’s a fair question. These platforms are new, their audiences are small relative to the general population and none of them have proven they’ll still be around in five years. Here’s a framework for deciding, rather than a checklist for doing.

Start with where your customers are

Friendster, LinkedIn, Orkut and Thefacebook each attract a different crowd. Friendster’s user base skews toward people who joined early for the novelty and is now thinning out as the site struggles with performance issues. LinkedIn’s users are working professionals who joined specifically to manage their career identity. Orkut, since its January 2004 launch, has caught on unevenly, strong in a handful of countries and largely absent elsewhere. Thefacebook, launched in February 2004, is currently limited to students at a growing list of universities.

If your customers aren’t meaningfully present on a given platform yet, there’s no decision to make: skip it for now. The mistake businesses make with new platforms isn’t joining too late, it’s joining before there’s anyone there worth reaching.

Match the platform to the kind of trust you need

LinkedIn is built around verified professional identity: real names, real job histories and recommendations from people you worked with. That structure makes it well suited to businesses that sell based on credibility and track record, consultants, agencies, B2B services. A profile there functions less like an ad and more like a reference check available at a glance.

Thefacebook, still university-only, works on a similar principle of verified identity, but tied to a school rather than a job. It has no commercial use yet for most businesses, but its growth pattern is worth watching: platforms that require real identity tend to earn more trust from users than the pseudonymous ones, and that trust is what eventually makes them valuable for marketing, not just for connecting people.

Weigh the cost against the size of the audience

None of these networks are big yet in absolute terms. The honest calculation for 2004 is: what does it cost you, mainly time, to build a real presence, and what’s the actual reach if you do? For most small businesses right now, that math favors LinkedIn, where the audience is smaller but directly relevant to B2B relationships, over Orkut or Friendster, where the audience may be larger but has little overlap with what you sell.

When it makes sense to wait

If your business sells to a broad consumer audience rather than other professionals, it’s reasonable to wait. None of the general-audience networks have reached the scale or stability yet where a consumer brand gets a meaningful return on the effort. Watching how Thefacebook expands past universities, and whether Orkut’s regional pockets of adoption grow into something broader, is a better use of attention right now than trying to force early activity on a platform your customers haven’t joined yet.

The one thing worth doing regardless

Whatever you decide about active participation, claim your business name on the platforms most relevant to your industry now, while it’s still easy to do. A crowded namespace a year from now is a much harder problem to fix than five minutes of registration today.