Many people have well justified reservations regarding the return on investment in marketing on social networks such as MySpace and Facebook. While brands are easily extensible into the social networking environment through profile creation, addition of friends, group presence and advertising, actually making sales is difficult.

Advertising on social network has had infrequent success. The initial comparison of social networking sites to portal sites Google or Yahoo has been proven wrong as network members demonstrate an established resistance to clicking to off-network websites.

Plus, the nature of social networks and expected privacy standards also make it impossible to easily include social network friends in direct marketing efforts.

Building your social network of friends can be expensive. While participation in most social networks is free, actively networking in their environment is very time consuming.

Yet there is a a very powerful, and mostly overlooked, low-cost way to build strong brand relationships and generate leads for direct marketing from your social network based target markets.

For full understanding first allow me to review some why and what related to users of social networks.

• The reason why, is that social networks can be incredibly rich in certain demographics. For example, while engaged people comprise lees than 1% of the US population, they are as high as 6% within some networks on Facebook.

• Secondly, what is a social network profile other than a collection of personal information that the profile owner desires to share with her friends.

These two points, a discernible richly populated target market with individuals wanting to share personal information is a potential “treasure”.

The way to reach this social network treasure is through a social network application that supports the targeted profile owner’s desire to share some particular piece of information, while at the same time extend your brand and support non-social network direct marketing efforts. In other words, someone using your application on their social network profile is virtually providing you word of mouth advertising and allowing you contact information needed to support direct marketing through regular email.

When we first began our efforts on MySpace almost two years ago I noticed that quizzes were madly popular. So we created our own quiz to appeal to our target market and provide traffic to our website. The quiz was just a few simple questions and a formula that, dependent upon the value of different answers, presented a banner to be displayed on the quiz taker’s MySpace profile. The quiz is named “Which Princess Bride Are You?” and has five different bride types. This created a huge number of links and dramatic increase in website traffic.

And, last year when Facebook opened up their application platform. We developed an application to place in her profile an engagement announcement and a fully functional self-created Google wedding map where she can share all the important location details of her wedding. This application allow us to extend our brand to a large number of Facebook members who are engaged and supports volume lead generation for direct marketing efforts for us and our client wedding professional subscribers.

I have also developed custom applications for a social cause (womens shelter), clients and helped others to do the same. While these social network applications cost from a just a few hundred dollars, they will operate for months with almost no time (and money) consuming personal involvement from the owner or assistant while providing measurable results 24/7/365. Leads, traffic and virtual “word of mouth” advertising – automatically.

After many discussions and brainstorming sessions, I think that almost all business can benefit from an application, because almost all our businesses provide some services, goods and expertise that our clients would enjoy sharing with their friends. If you would like to talk about how an application could be linked and useful for your business or the value of targeted applications in general just send me an email*. I would be glad to share more specific in-depth thoughts.

(* – Or if you are a wedding professional who would like to participate in our unique bride-to-be leadstream.)