Alice Magazine is often asked for advice on the minefield that is social networking. Although there are already millions of posts on this topic we thought we would tell you about the social networls that are dear to us and how we use them to make Alice Magazine a better and brighter place. We’ve called this list a top ten but there is no particular order to it. So, our favourite tools and the reasons why are…

1. Twitter.com

Twitter delivers short timely messages to a follower/followers network. Using this service and the ability to self-update to and from other sites can save a lot of money, time and energy. We present our magazine to a highly targeted readership using twitter plus stay up-to-date with our readers.

2. Flickr.com

Anyone using images or photography on their site can make great use of Flickr’s tagging system. Upload and tag a photo with related keywords and google image search will love you. Then make sure you have your company information on your Flickr page and relevant links. When uploading any digital images to the internet, if they are original and you own them you should always pop a watermark or copyright notice on them for good measure. Digital images are never yours unless you make them so.

3. Tumblr.com

Here’s another reason to copyright your images or at least make some claim to them as your originals. Tumblr is a blogging platform we feel is more suited to photo bloggers and therefore we use it as a visual bookmark and traffic driver. Posts don’t receive a great search engine listing in themselves but within the follower/followers network and your tumblr dashboard, (remember, choosing the right tag words is essential!), you can pick up momentum for your own website if you are clever. The majority of tumblr posts are photos and videos. These can be re-blogged by other tumblr users which means your photo is now on their blog too and can also be re-blogged from their blog as well as your own creating a massive audience for your images. What does every image you upload therefore need to have? Yes, an embedded link back to your site will ensure that even when re-blogged, every click on that photo takes you straight to your own site. Otherwise your content will appear as belonging to someone else. But what about blogging words rather than pictures? Read on.

4. Blogs (Blogger.com, Wordpress.org & Typepad.com)

We lost count of the amount of blogging platforms available but in our eyes there are only three contenders. Firstly you want a blog platform that you can make some money out of? Don’t blog at social network sites like myspace or facebook. Start a blog elsewhere and feed that blog into your social network. The three favourites for us are Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad. Blogger is free and easy to use and is best for beginners or those wishing to start writing asap with quick design options. Blogger tends to be basic in design but there are many things you can do with it given a little knowledge or use of free templates which can be found easily in a google search. Rankings are high and it’s a great place to start. For the semi-advanced user with a larger readership we suggest Typepad. It’s a paid hosting service but it provides a consistently great platform for professional blogs or companies. Hugely popular and fantastic value. The design options are greatly varied and you need little technical knowledge. Lastly we suggest Wordpress (download wordpress from wordpress.org, don’t use wordpress.com as the options are very limited). You ideally want a self-hosted blog running wordpress. It’s for the more advanced user especially when straying away from basic templates. Alice Magazine runs on wordpress using a fab template called Branford Magazine that we tweaked until just right. It was a steep learning curve to master!. In our opinion wordpress.org offers the most advanced options for the least amount of money.

5. Facebook.com

Obviously the Facebook boom is over but everyone is still using it to some extent. Our facebook business page delivers some fantastic stats about our readership, where they live, how old, what gender etc. Quite a lot of businesses opt to have a seperate profile for their business as well which is possibly not allowed officially we will have to check that one out for you.

6. Stumbleupon.com

This website provides a huge percentage of daily traffic to our site. It’s a social bookmark where users “stumbleupon” their favourite sites using keywords and a desktop tool. We “stumble” every post we make using the nifty toolbar addon so we only need to press a button and add tags.

7. We Heart It.com

Another solely visual bookmark site. Basically you “heart” an image on the web from your toolbar add on and add tags to your image. Others can heart your images and each image automatically includes a link back to the site from whence it came. As you probably already know we “heart” every single image post we make and get richly rewarded with traffic.

8. Linked In.com

Linked In keeps us up to date with our business contacts and industry colleagues. It also keeps us very much in the loop and drives traffic to the magazine because we take part in discussions and conversations over there on a weekly basis. Also brilliant for discovering new partners and projects.

9. Myspace.com

What’s myspace doing in here you ask? Believe it or not people still use myspace and our stats show we generate traffic here too. Not as much as a few years ago, granted but then we tend not to spend a lot of time on myspace, just to update our status three times daily…which takes five seconds and our twitter can usually update it for us.

10. Second Life

Some people tend to squirm if you tell them you use Second Life for business – except of course the others who use Second Life for business or even run an exclusive SL business. In this 3d virtual world there is an economy, you can buy and make what are known as linden dollars. You can convert them into real life dollars. You can have a lot of fun doing this. Most of the successful SL businesses I know of are creative and artistic. A lot of them see more enthusiasm and return inside SL than they do outside of it. Something work thinking about if you are thinking of turning that hobby into a full-time concern. It’s also one of the most social networks available because you can converse directly and create things, transfer things, share things and experiences, make contacts and friends. Since we started our Second Life we have seen an increase in real life web traffic as direct results of SL communication. It’s not for everyone but it’s worth trying out.