Marketing Social Networking Sites

Our charity hosts pages on various social networking sites and I am keen to market them. Does anyone know if there are codes of best practice I should take in to account when marketing social networking sites to young people? This is a great way to reach and provide support to young people but I would not want our organisation to be critised for promoting sites that are not safe.

Any advice would be welcomed. Thanks, Liz

Liz - Definitely where all the youth are so go ahead!

Could you be a little clearer in what you are trying to achieve? Are you trying to educate youth or is your ROI, sponsorship e.g. $$$. You should think carefully like with any marketing strategy, about your goals & what you are aiming to achieve! Then if the objectives match with particular social networks or other digital media then integrate it nicely and work with someone who can do it for you... The biggest danger with web2.0 medias for brands is that a good solid strategy needs to be implemented and you need to think about the long-term... Banners, campaign microsites etc... can be removed when you are done but content once within the digital space these days never simply disappears... Its there for good!!! The user drives the content where they want to... But never the less this is what we want.... so make a good strategy for the long-term, implement it well & hope for the best! But use people who know about these medias e.g. your digi agency...

Hope that helped in someway... feel free to email me with questions if I can help you in anyway!!!

I agree - it depends what you hope to achieve. If you mean advertising and marketing outside the realm of social media sites themselves, then treat it like you would marketing for any website. 

Marketing within social networks themselves is another story. If it's just volumes of users and getting lots of users signing up to your social media profile as friends, then you can do it the cheap but time intensive way - search for similarly themed social media profiles as yours, take a look at their 'friends' list and email / post a message on their wall asking if they'd like to take a look or become a friend of your profile. Be transparent about who you are (an employee of a charitable organisation) at all times and this should work over time. If you work hard enough to develop lasting relationships with certain users, they can become brand ambassadors of a sort and promote your profile to their friends and so on. All obvious stuff, but effective. There are a whole load of other approaches which we manage on behalf of our clients (owners of youth brands). There's also advertising on a social network's own ad platform which isn't overly expensive.

 I'd be happy to discuss this further offsite and explore ways in which we could help drive the campaign.