Social Network for New Business Venture

Social network is always about me and my network, but if "me" is changed into "the business", then it will also be "the business's network". Nowadays, Facebook seems to be the most popular one, however that may not be the case in the other part of the world and Facebook may not provide other facilities that are offered by another social networking site.

The more social networking site appears, the broader the function of social network since each site will tend to appear different to the others. I will anayse how social network can be used in supporting both primary and secondary activities of new business venture.

Based on Alexa Global Page Rank, there are 4 social network site in top 25 that are:
- Facebook
- Twitter
- MySpace
- LinkedIn

Where possibly each social networking site has a role in?

Picture 1 Social Network Sites in Value Chain Model

The model above shows that social networking sites can be used in both a secondary activitie (human resource management) or a primary activity (marketing & sales). Both activities have a similar characteristic, that is a need to interact with external entities such as labor market and customer market.

1. Human Resource Management
LinkedIn can be used to find either a partner or an executive. In LinkedIn, people can endorse others, so through LinkedIn, HR can make a better judgement from that.

2. Marketing and Sales
Facebook and MySpace have people's information. Thus they can put ads based on target market of the product that is advertised. While Twitter can help to push information to anyone and FourSquare can mark your product and service based on your location.

It may be difficult to organise all the social networking sites, but now there are some softwares that you may can use like TweetDeck or Windows Mobile 7 to manage all your social network accounts.