Usefulness of Social Networking sites for Business

In today's era, online shopping is the current 'in' thing, as one does not have to step out of the house, and go to a physical store to purchase items that one wants. Instead, with a click of the mouse, and after payment is being made, the item would than be delivered to one's home after a few days. Furthermore, with most of the younger generation being technology-savvy, online shopping seems to be staying in trend. Besides, most people would have an account to the social networking site be it Facebook or Friendster. Thus, setting up business via the social networking site is not an impossible task, and it could be rather useful.

This is because not only can one save up the cost of renting a physical store in one of the malls, one could also save up on the advertising fees. The only thing that one has to do is to set up a profile page, make it available for everyone to view, add a few personal friends, and they would than be your "advertisers", who would than introduce your profile page to their friends, perhaps through their "Wall" page, which is available on Facebook. After which, those who are interested or curious can simply enter your site with a click of the mouse, since it does not require much effort. Hence, if you are lucky enough, you might than be able to launch your first business deal if any of your friends, or your friends' friends are interested in the items that you are selling. Moreover, you could also add those users as your friends even though your might not know them. This might then increase your chances of having your profile being viewed, as you had already captured their attention.

In addition, as mentioned frequently, Internet is a powerful tool as it could make something be known quickly. Thus, if one were to make one's profile page available to everyone, those who are frequent social networking users might than just enter your site while going through the other users' profile pages. Therefore, they might once again be your potential customers.

Moreover, if these online customers find your items nice or useful they might introduce your site to their other friends. As mentioned earlier, most people now are technology-savvy, thus when they are using the Internet, they might just decide to pop by your site to take a look at the items that you are selling as it is easily accessible and does not take up much of their time.

However, there are of course disadvantages to it. This is because as mentioned the site can be reached by a click of the mouse, meaning that there are competitors whom are also just a click away. Therefore, it is important to make your profile page and items attractive enough to retain customers. Furthermore, the duration of the popularity of a social networking site is unpredictable. Thus, if a social networking site suddenly lose its popularity and most users move on to the other more popular site, one could actually lose his or her customers.

An example would be Friendster. Friendster used to be one of the more popular social networking site before Facebook started replacing it. Therefore, before that there were actually businesses done on the webpage of Friendster, and it seemed rather successful as one could see business deals being made through the comments made on the comment board of Friendster. However, when the Facebook trend started to rise, most users began to abandon Friendster and started using Facebook. As such, the businesses started on Friendster might began fail and be forced to close down. If not they would have to move on to the other sites such as blogspot.com or livejournal.com, and also to inform their customers about it so that they would continue to frequent their "shops". If not they might be easily forgotten as there are many other online shops around.