This is a guest post by James Williams who is the Community Manager for TM International, a Paris-based recruitment agency

Social networking is not a new phenomenon. This won’t be the first time you’ve heard the term and if you are like the many millions of “constantly-connected” professionals out there it’s probably something you do on a regular basis. Networking has always been a great tool for businesses to reap benefits from, and that hasn’t changed. What’s changed is the way we network – what we do and how we do it. As technology continues along its path to world domination it’s becoming much more common for the “traditional” methods of networking to be replaced by new “social” techniques. However, what’s become clear to me is that there are still quite a large number of people who don’t really understand the benefits. Some don’t know why people do it, some don’t know what to do, some are unsure where to do it and some have no idea whatsoever and appear to have missed the whole social media revolution. So this can just be a general recap for everyone on why social networking is so important for your business.

The first area of benefit for social networking is awareness. Now the reason I say area of benefit is because there are a large number of benefits that occur from increased awareness as a sort of “knock-on effect.” Awareness is really the umbrella term under which a multitude of other benefits lie, and I will go on to discuss those. Social networking is the easiest and one of the most effective ways of increasing awareness of your business. The days of advertising in the local paper or magazine are behind us, with TV advertising likely to follow in the next few years. As a business trying to get your name out there you need to be where the people are. And where are these people? On social networks! Facebook’s got 850+ million users, LinkedIn is approaching 150 million and Twitter now has well over 300 million, and that’s not even mentioning the newest social network Google+ which has the fastest growth rate of any social network in history. So if you want people to be aware of your company then, without question, you have to have a presence on social networks.

But people being aware of you is just the start. The more people you reach, the more people will visit your profile on whichever social network. The more people who visit your profile, the more people will visit your website (provided you have included a link to it!). And with drastically increased traffic to your website and social networks there is a much bigger chance of you winning new business. For example, say you have a fan base of 200 on Facebook, a Twitter following of 300 and 500+ connections on LinkedIn. You then choose to advertise your product/service on LinkedIn. This has already reached your connections on that network instantly, and because you’ve linked up your LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook accounts, your post has been published on your Twitter feed and on your Facebook page. So before anyone has done anything, in the click of a button you have potentially reached around 1000 people. But that’s nothing! Social networking gives you the perfect opportunity for what I like to call “the ripple effect”. This is similar to the process of things going viral (apart from it’s not a YouTube video of a cat dancing). Your initial reach of 1000 people can be multiplied to an incredible number. Your LinkedIn connections share the post/information with their connections. Your audience on Facebook clicks “like,” sharing that information with every single one of their friends. And finally the people who follow you on Twitter “retweet” it to their followers and so on. That means, providing you post good content, you can grow your initial network of 1000 people to 20, 30, 40 times that. Without sounding too dramatic the possibilities are literally endless.

The problem with increasing the number of people who know about your business is that you are also increasing the potential number of people who can criticize you. However, if you are choosing to opt out of using social networks for your business, what’s important to remember is that people are going to talk about you online whether you have a presence there or not. Therefore social networks give you the opportunity to manage your e-reputation. You can use your social networks as a platform for your customers/clients. You can develop a relationship with them and create a personable online experience which allows the customer to voice their opinion in a way that will not prove negative for your image. By managing your e-reputation you create a much higher potential for customer loyalty, and therefore retention, as well as gaining new customers who will see your positive and helpful image online.

Because of the connection to customers which social networks provide you, social networking can also be a great way to understand customer needs. This can in turn allow you to come up with new ideas for your business or simply improve on previous mistakes because you now have channels which allow constant feedback. And as you know, listening to feedback is one of the most important factors when it comes to business success.

Keeping the customer/client in mind, social networking provides the perfect opportunity to target the right people. Through your social networks you can target relevant industry professionals, whether it be in LinkedIn groups, on a Facebook page or by using the # tag on Twitter. So this means you can implement a targeted marketing effort which will drastically increase your efficiency and effectiveness. It may sound obvious but once you know where your customers are it makes it much easier to communicate with them and social networking allows you to do just that!

And that’s just a few of the benefits that social networking can bring you. It really can’t be stressed enough that social networks are the place to be for today’s businesses, they are essential to your survival. Who knows, in the future the social network may even replace a company’s website.