Social Networking and Web2.0: these are basically buzz words that you probably seeing around in magazines and newspapers all the time at the moment. A social networking site is basically a site that is aimed at building a community of people who share interest and activities or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Some of the most common social and networking sites that you might of heard of are: Myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
The idea behind this in terms of traffic generation is that where there are people, there are traffic generation opportunities. The traffic generation strategies normally revolve around mobilising a community of enthusiasts that exist within these social networking sites around your product and service area and then getting them to your website. There are a few problems that this presents for business lead generation.
Firstly, the target audience is very often in the sub-30 age group. If your product or service is aimed at HR managers who tend to be aged 35-40+, pretty conservative and aren't necessarily trawling Myspace all the time, then you may not actually be able to generate very high-quality content by using this type of technique.
Secondly, social network users are notoriously resistant to being pitched to, so you need to be subtle and have a subtle entre to your products offered, rather than just smashing them with your ad or your specific offer. You have to provide value and be a leader within the community. You also have to have the right product or service.
One of my colleagues Nick Schoonens has a blog called rczero.com; it's devoted to remote control enthusiasts; remote control cars, remote control planes and there's a monetization motto behind it which I won't go into. Nick has actually used social networks like Myspace very effectively to generate very significant amount of traffic to that site. That's because the audience on those social networking sites is exactly the same audience that are going to visit his blog and become a community on his blog as well, so there's a good match there.
Let's suppose that your service was rubbish removal. It's pretty hard to imagine setting up a community on Myspace all around rubbish removal and hope to get people to your site, because people frankly aren't interested in that unless they have a need for it right at that moment.
When you are making efforts at business lead generation, social networking sites are not as cost effective as many other strategies you could be using. I would suggest trying out other strategies before using social networking to drive traffic to your site.