Finding the Right Internet Strategy

In the internet century businesses have greater possibilities of reaching a spread of potential clients than ever before, however, equally, that potential is more or less confined to a pair of monsters of the world wide web: Google and Facebook.

The second of these has just become the most frequently used site on the web with 700 million members spending an average of 372 minutes connected each month. It's also getting ready for an initial public offering in 2012, and as a result the social network is working to make itself more profitable, and therefore more appealing to speculators.

Building a business strategy founded on social media is not easy. Most experts think that Facebook is critical, but at the same time it's almost impossible to know how much to invest, or how to target your capital.

The problem is that a innovative idea can earn incredible attention for practically no outlay: a video that becomes 'viral', is an easy example. That said, even if you pay ad companies who tend to have fantastic ideas, it's not certain that you'll enjoy the same attention as a competitor who gets lucky.

The most important thing, then, is to go about things the old fashioned way. It is genuinely likely that Facebook users will start to feel attacked by marketing and stop noticing it.

What a company has to do is fashion some sort of connection with it's potential customers via social networks. One great example of this in the last few months was a hypermarket which asked it's 'friends' on Facebook to complete the phrase "If I had 5 minutes to spend in the store, I would buy..." This encouraged tens of thousands of posts that were dropped between people's wall messages and rapidly earned unprecedented exposure.

Even though Facebook is the location of 33% of worldwide online marketing, in reality it only boasts an ad click rate of 0.04%, so splashing out on an ad campaign is therefore not the way to go.

In the internet century, campaign executives must be more clever than that and genuinely try to understand how clients use social networks before essentially attempting to market to them. It's a world crammed with possibilities, it's just working out how to grasp them that's the challenge.

Henry Cotterill is a freelance business journalist who specialises in qualifications and education in the business industry. He recommends MBA and Co http://www.mbaandco.com/companies for improving your business strategy skills.