A new report at emarketer.com reviles what many of us have long suspected, the baby boomer generation have embraced new media and social networking on a scale that puts their children to shame.

This may not be so surprising as we are talking about the children of the 50′s and the young adults of the 70′s who were the first to have telephones as a standard in their homes growing up, communicating and sharing ideas and values has always been an important and integral part of their lives and the growth of their use of social media is just an extension of that.

The reports author Lisa E. Phillips said that “Creating and renewing personal connections online is the biggest draw for these boomers,” “About 47% of online boomers maintain a profile on at least one social network, according to several sources. Their contacts include family, friends and co-workers of all ages.” she went on to explain.

More detail on the report can be seen at emarketer.com, but it would be good to hear from you on this topic, post your comments below and share your thoughts with the rest of us.

What is Social networking? – This is the term that covers online communities like facebook, myspace, bebo where people network with friends and businesses, or just with people who share a similar interest to you.

How you can use social networking to promote your business – You can create a profile for your business and begin using Events, Fan Pages and Groups to promote your business, let people know about things you have planned, sales that are on, sponsorships and charity fundraising that you have been involved with. Yoy can send out news updates about events, new products etc to draw more people into your website.

You can build more of a relationship with your customers by speaking to them, answering questions and finding out what they like and dislike, interacting in this way with your customers makes them feel appreciated and they feel that there opinions matter. You are able to perform market research that leads to brand loyalty by giving your customers exactly what they want.

Paid For Advertising – Many social networking sites offer paid for advertising. Advertising is focused on user demographics rather than search phrases. Allowing a businesses to target users based on a number of criteria such as age, sex, education and interests.

Web 2.0 is a buzz phrase for user interactivity on the Internet, this is a marketing term as much as a technical design or programming term and is short hand for allowing feedback and other forms of interactivity on a website.

You may be familiar with many forms of web 2.0 with out realising it, if you have used Ebay or Amazon then the feedback or review pages are basically web 2.0 content. 

New applications and technology that allow users with little technical knowledge to create their own webpages or submit content to existing websites, good examples of this include blogs, you can create a blog and update it as often as you like with little or no technical knowledge, you do not need to worry about such things as hosting or FTP, if you can use a word processing package, such as word then you can have your own blog.

Social Networking, Social Bookmarking, Customer Reviews, Blogs, Wikis, RSS feeds are all common uses for web 2.0 and all allow interactivity between the user of the website and the website itself, this can be great for content generation and sharing ideas or for leaving feedback and conducting customer research.