The New Power Girls: What Social Networks Are Best for Your Business?

Entrepreneur Sayeh Pezeshki sits back in the bright white chair of her corporate office as she talks with a leading retail magazine about use of social media and her business. As she shares insight on how her online retail startup, Sortingwithstyle.com, uses social media, she rattles off the half dozen or so sites that her team taps. "I also have a company blog, The OfficeStylist, where I write weekly posts about various products on our site and office styling tips," she adds. "It, combined with our Twitter page, which is directly linked to our Facebook, generates about 10% of our monthly traffic." Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Shaherose Charania's popular Women 2.0 organization uses Facebook and Linkedin along with Twitter to reach a near combined 20,000 people.

When it comes to making the most of the new social web, Power Girls know how to work it.

Media personality and entrepreneur Justine Ezarik took advantage of it to singlehandedly turn a lifecast spot to a massive personal brand. SavvyAuntie.com founder Melanie Notkin's social media presence has brought her sponsored attention from several prestigious brands. My first startup, a pioneering social media internet company, drew a large percentage of traffic from more than a half dozen social networks around the world, where fashion fans were talking about the latest in clothes, shoes and handbags. Today, I'm leveraging Twitter for my personal blog, which resulted in the popular site Gigaom's founder noting it on his Twitter feed -- and driving more than one thousand visitors to my site in just two days time.

Today's modern women entrepreneurs and executives are using tools like blogs, social networks and other social internet technologies to draw big-time attention to their brands.

"Women 2.0 uses social networks to "share interesting links related to tech and entrepreneurship, promote upcoming events and achievements in the community," shared Charania via email. "Information spreads virally on these networks and touches people. Many new community members discover Women 2.0 through one of these channels."

"It's great because it's free -- the only cost to you is time," added Pezeshki.

But one of the biggest elements to utilizing social networks for your company is knowing what networks are appropriate in terms of age, demographic and targets. It's often a stumbling block as media and blogs often direct users to whatever site is most popular at the moment. However, the crowd that uses Facebook varies from the crowd on on Twitter and MySpace, and it can move from there. The key is to take a good look at who is using the various sites and go from there. Twitter is said to be heavily populated with an older crowd, as with Facebook, while MySpace allegedly boasts younger demographics. While lots of social media experts encourage companies to launch a blog, whether or not that's a right fit for your enterprise varies. Is your customer base the type that regularly engages in blogs? Do you have the time to pen consistent articles every few days? Can/will it be an effective social web tool for your business?

"The key is really knowing who you want to reach and doing a little homework," Pezeshki shared.

What social networks are best for your business? See what Meghan and I have to say here.

Comments

[anonie]

WOW - A New Power Girl is a person with a website which in total (all stats on blogs are available to the public) has only 3k unique views while using 6 or more sites to promote her website is considered a media power player?

I would suggest a little better research.

[Patricia Handschiegel - Huffpost Blogger]

The free stat sites are not widely seen as accurate sources. It's been published on blogs and media on this about Alexa, etc. forever. I chart what I consider reasonable growth based on what I see from sources, and that's not using analytics numbers from sources that have been said to be recognized as fairly flawed in the market.

Depending on which source you're referring to here, that I know of at least two women I've mentioned above have had interest for multimedia play (TV, books, etc.) and that would technically make someone a media player in my book.