Even my Grandmother who is 90 yrs old has a facebook account.  What does that tell you?  Everyone has caught on…everyone.

Now the only question is how much should I rely on social networking?

If anyone ever tells you that all you need is a facebook account and a link to an affiliate product to get paid, well that person is sending you down a very narrow path that will eventually take more then a machete to traverse through.

Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, YouTube and several others should have one purpose for any business.

That is to move prospective business contacts away from the social networking sites and into the security of ones own website and marketing campaign.

Social Networking sites are great, however let’s say you had a facebook account that suddenly was canceled without notice.  The hope is that you would have taken the 5000 friends that you had collected over the past 2 years and saved them into an excel spreadsheet.  Otherwise they would have been lost forever.
Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and YouTube have been around less then 7 yrs.  There might be other sites that become more popular in the years to come.  To Guarantee a long lasting online business model to work, make sure you are doing what you need to do to properly protecting yourself.

By this I mean, make sure you are saving those videos that you are posting on YouTube and Facebook.  Save your contacts from Facebook by exporting them onto a CSV file, or to Yahoo.  Keep an eye on who you are connected with on all of your social media sites and streamline them.  Remember, you may have people spread out from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, ning, and more who are just out there on all of those sites.  Get them streamlined.

What do I mean by streamlined?

I mean, get a list of all of your contacts on all social platforms and discover who is connecting with you on all of them.  For Instance, my friend Chris Farrell, is friends with me on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Linkedin.  Give those people who are following you across all social media platforms a greater priority.  Then attempt to get those who are say only following you on Facebook, a call to action to go “check you out” on YouTube.

By doing this you can answer the question-Who are the people that are truly interested in me and why?

So not only do you need to save and protect your contacts, you should also protect your CONTENT.  That being pictures, written articles, video that you want to save.

I will actually have my videos parked at several different Video Hosting Sites.

I also personally use Amazon S3 to host my videos for my site.  It is a storage area for whatever data you want to protect.  I use it in association with EZS3 .  So just in case something happens to that same video on YouTube, I have it backed up.

EZS3 is a site that works with Amazons S3 storage so that you can upload all of your videos and EZS3 will create video players for you and a ton of really cool stuff.

It is definitely important to put an emphasis on Social Media Marketing, just remember that it is also good to create your own social network that you can control.  Namely your website and your list.

Please if you found this article helpful, please click the “like” button or share the info.  Cheers, Casey.