Why Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube are So Important

If you do not feel like reading this, it is a call to action (with super gratitude in advance!).

What we are asking you to do as soon as possible is:

• Become a Friend on MySpace: www.myspace.com/don_rickert
• Become a Friend on Facebook: www.facebook.com/donald.rickert1
• Become a Follower on our don_rickert Twitter account: twitter.com/don_rickert
• Become a Follower on our AdventurousMuse Twitter account: twitter.com/AdventurousMuse
• Subscribe to our RSS feed via this site: feeds.feedburner.com/AdventurousMuse
• Become one of our Subscribers on YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/DoctorFiddle
• Tell your friends about us and ask if they might do the same

We know that this is a big favor to ask, as we know that everyone is busy navigating through these hard times, but we need your help more than you might know (we know that a lot of our customers who are friends know our story).

The various sites, like the ones listed in the title of this post, are called "social networking" sites. If you run a specialty business like our online musical instrument store, the Adventurous Muse Store, they, especially Twitter and YouTube, but also Facebook and MySpace, play a major role in getting people interested enough in what you are doing to visit your main sites. This is often called "driving traffic." These visits to your main sites, in turn, increase the probability of people finding your online store when searching with tools such as Google (How this works is very complicated and another topic altogether.)

Having many Followers, Friends, Subscribers, Fans (the various social networking sites use different names for the same concept) is essential to being noticed...getting attention in what has been called the "attention economy", where the number of Followers, Friends and Subscribers, etc. is an indicator of your "value".

In addition to all of the above, the social networking sites are far better than email newsletters, or even our blogs, for disseminating information quickly. In this case, important information would be new videos that we have put on YouTube, information about new instruments, store specials, etc. on Twitter, and so forth.

We have, in fact, found email lists to be almost useless, as people are so overwhelmed with the email they receive. Also, mass emailings often are automatically sent to either a spam or junk mail folder.

Bottom line: We are doing pretty well at getting followers on our Twitter accounts; however, many of these are not bona fide and some are apparently even members of the world's oldest profession. We need more legitimate followers on Twitter (don_rickert and AdventurousMuse). Also, because we just started using Facebook and MySpace in a serious way, we really need Friends on Facebook and MySpace. We can always use new Subscribers on YouTube.

Thank you for your help on this!

Don Rickert, Ph.D., IDSA
Managing Partner, Don Rickert Design