My latest addiction – sorta – is Facebook. We all depend on social connections to some extent, and there are places where you just have to be at certain times if you want to be connected to others in the community. For SEOs, they used to be forums first – but that was long ago – then there was Threadwatch, then it died, meanwhile there was MySpace and everybody was wondering how to use it for their business needs (although MySpace was never meant for that really), then there was LinkedIn characteristic of being specifically designed for business connections… Facebook has not started yesterday but originally, it was totally unimpressive due to lots of limitations. Well, at this point I have decided – and maybe it’s even a bit too late but still – that enough of people I might be interested are on Facebook already – and went ahead and joined it as well.
I’ve yet to see if it’s any good for business as at the time of this writing the “Marketplace” it has is down for maintenance. This is not your typical SEO-exploitable network however as profile pages are only visible to those logged in – hence no link value. So it can be the purest experiment in benefitting from traffic/connections within the social network itself alone, no side effects whatsoever. I bet it can be good for local businesses though, as you automatically belong to the network based on your location you have defined when registering. There are also groups that people can create themselves and these have a nice potential as well – I have joined a few SEO-related groups and started one of my own. Groups are good for finding contacts – a process that is otherwise not so straightforward. Events are clearly another locally targeted feature (or else online targeted – why not?). I will play more with all of these and report if I find anything interesting.