Retailers are creating a presences on social networks to make a minimal investment in an attempt to gain maximum exposure.

Roxy, a retail clothing store, posted a video on the social network and video site You Tube to get potential customers interested in its brand.

Roxy focused on making the video not just entertaining, but unique and compelling, factors required to stand out among the millions of videos online. Roxy got much more than it hoped for. YouTube staff came upon the video "Roxy Presents... Shimmer" and found it unique and compelling enough to place on the social networking giant's highly coveted home page for a weekend. 48 hours later, the video went from 2,000 views to more than half a million. A lot more potential customers now know the brand Roxy

Social networking by design fosters viral activity, interaction spinning off in all directions. And that is what Roxy experienced that weekend. During the ensuing days, viewers of the video shared it with friends, who in turned shared it with friends, and so on. All this activity led to increases in Roxy's You Tube channel subscribers and views of the retailer's 40 other videos. Word of mouth then spread the activity from YouTube to other Roxy online locations:

The number of Facebook friends and visitors to the retailer's blog and ecommerce site all increased. Many retailers question the use of social networks as marketing tools because of the inability to prove return on investment in hard dollars. Roxy says these retailers are missing the point.

"It's not always about measuring sales or activity on an ecommerce site," says Chris Todd, director of online marketing at Roxy. "With Social networks it's really about looking at overall brand engagement and buzz. Ultimately that will translate into sales, it's just not as obvious."

Many marketers and social web experts agree with Todd, saying it's difficult to make an argument against free access to scores of millions of potential customers who already have made public basic demographic information and their interests.

Put simply, it's such a small investment that any return is great. Which is why some retailers are climbing on board the five-year-old social network phenomenon.

Americans have embraced social networks, adding more content to the Internet by the minute. But Big Business has also set its sights on the social networks. Just one example, Google Inc. acquired YouTube for 1.65 billion in October 2006. Pioneering retailers spanning size and product categories from Roxy to Amazon.com and PetsUnited to Biglow Tea are creating Pages and Channels on the network building a whole new way of marketing to consumers.

The big three social networks are extraordinarily popu­lar. MySpace, founded in 2003, is the third most visited web site by U.S. Internet users. Facebook, founded in 2004, is ninth, and YouTube founded in 2005, is tenth. Facebook reports more than 70 million active users.

The research firms also measure where social networkers go when leaving the network. About .05% of social networkers went directly to a retail site in January 06. In January 2008, this number jumped to 3% of users which immediately visited a retail site. Many retail­ers new to social networking are gravitating toward Facebook because of its demographics and structure, experts say.

When Free Beer Buddy Inc, which owns and operates www.freebeerbuddy.com , had its group started on Facebook, it saw a 58% increase in traffic. Before having the group started, Facebook accounted for 3% of Free Beer buddy's traffic. After the start of the group, Facebook now accounts for 3.74% of the traffic to its site.

The trend is clear, social networking drives visitors to your site.

You can create and maintain your own Facebook page or have it done by the pros. Corfun Inc, who owns, operates, creates and manages websites now offers this service. They can be found at www.corfun.com or you can send and email to henry@corfun.com

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 [Social Networking Drives Hits Up On Websites]

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