Social networks

You can use social networks to build a list of 'friends' who you can message in a similar way to email and promote your website. Social networks also have a viral aspect where people sign-up to your cause because they've seen it appear in a friend's newsfeed or on their profile. You can make it easy to sign up by adding links to your Facebook, Myspace, Bebo or other social networking profiles on to your website homepage. Social networks work best when you put a lot of time in to them; sending messages, responding to friend requests, commenting on other people's profiles. They are informal social spaces, so the more personal & friendly you can be, the better. People in social networks will tend to ignore corporate communications. Think carefully about who you are trying to attract using social networking sites, in some societies social networking sites are mostly used by a younger audience, however social networking sites are increasingly gaining popularity with different communities, i.e some with younger users and some with older users.

It's important to appreciate that different cultures use different social networks in different ways. The majority of Orkut members are in Brazil, and it is also popular in India. China has QQ , Japan has Mixi and Cyworld originated in South Korea. Youth in Kosova and the Kosovan diaspora use Hi5 rather than MySpace or Bebo. Across the Middle East the picture seems varied; while there are Iranian MySpace pages with thousands of friends, Saudi Arabians seem keener on Orkut, and there are MySpace look-alikes like MuslimSpace.

Other types of social networking sites include voting sites like Digg and Stumbleupon. If enough people have rated your content on one of these it can lead to big spikes in traffic to your site. So an alternative method of online promotion is to  encourage your supporters to vote for your stories.

Twitter is emerging as an important tool for online promotion. It's hard to describe Twitter well, except as a mixture of micro-blogging (160 characters per entry as in mobile phone text messages) and social networking. It works across the web and with mobile phones and feels 'live'. People are using Twitter to share interesting content, especially to respond to things that are happening at that moment or to share snippets of and links to interesting articles and blog posts. People are using Twitter to share interesting content, especially to respond to things that are happening at that moment, like Egyptian activists twittering about arrests.