Social networking has taken over the Internet. Ever person online is taking part in it. We marketers simply must make use of it.

Having access to all those people, knowing their likes and dislikes, problems and needs, their age and what they do, we could target them very precisely. That information is almost on the edge of privacy violation, and that’s one of the reasons why big networks such as Facebook don’t want to disclose that information to marketers. We can always find ways to target those people despite that, but the strict rules make it difficult.

So what do we do in order to solve that problem and still use the power of social marketing while not being called spammers? We can create our own social networking sites and create our own communities where we will be the ones creating the rules. And maybe we can show Facebook how it’s done

We usually start with the niche and keyword research. We can do that in Google search, by searching our big keywords. Google gives us suggestions as we type, and those suggestions are what other people type in when they are searching in our niche. We can pick a few of those we see fit and see their competition by searching them in quotes (phrase match). We need as little competition as we can get while still maintaining good traffic.

We also take into account the websites that come up and see if we can compete with them by checking if they are well optimized, how many backlinks they have, what are their PR. Any opportunity to get among the top results can bring us a lot of easy but very targeted traffic.

Then we see how much estimated traffic we can get for those keywords. Google Keyword Tool tells as pretty accurate numbers, but we can also check them by running AdWords. We can also check the commercial viability that way. The commercial viability can also be looked up by considering the other ads on Google.

Our goal is to find the perfect combination of traffic and competition, for our social networking site to succeed even before it’s created. And we wouldn’t have to spend our funds to do this research.