- The Social Media Bandwagon - Matt Hamm
Social Media has grown to massive proportions in business and pleasure. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Hi5, MySpace and many more sites are dedicated to bringing people into networks, sharing information and having fun.
These websites pose a potential gold mine in free marketing for businesses that are willing to learn how to use them for the growth of their companies. Here’s a little look at how it’s possible.
Ways to Get in Touch with Clients
We have taken some of the most common and most popular forms of social media and talk about each one in turn.
Facebook: With more than 500 million registered Facebook users, the opportunities for free business exposure are endless. With apps, pages, groups and events, Facebook provides a comprehensive platform for delivering your company’s message. Facebook creates for a developer’s paradise and businesses are finding new and exciting ways to make the most of Facebook’s structure. Due to the sheer numbers on Facebook however, without some dynamic development, a company’s message can be quite easily lost in the fight to draw attention to one’s page or group.
Twitter: This website exploded when it went live in 2009. The draw for people to write snippets, anecdotes, sound bites, etc. was incredible. This Micro-Blogging revelation provides an excellent platform to build up relationships with fellow tweeters.
As the business world inevitably latched onto its marketing potential, the site has developing, providing apps and RSS attachments, a great asset for companies with websites generating constant content. This site is great if your company is continuously generating news and is a good way to give updates.
YouTube: Is the most heavily used audio/visual media online and provides a useful tool for displaying products and services. There is a lot of competition in YouTube for viewers’ attention and topics designed to attract will generate more traffic.
Blogs: Blogs started the rise of social media by given users a tool for personal reflection, news and comments. With very little experience necessary in web design, anyone with the will to succeed started blogging about their various interests and now there exist some 9 million blogs (As in 2008) on line.
Blogging is great for discussion, sharing views and opinions and with Wordpress, the standard platform on which most blogs are based, the options for SEO and overall traffic generation is made simple. Blogging is great if your company generates a lot more news than you can squeeze into the 140 word allocation on Twitter. If a blog builds trust, this little community will generate more traffic through word of mouth, probably still the best form of marketing there is.
LinkedIn: For B2B relationship building, nothing compares to LinkedIn. Similar to Facebook, you connect to people you know and can see connections of connections, etc. The added advantage is that whereas Facebook’s option for employment history stays largely dormant in the Info of a person’s profile, LinkedIn gives lots more options by using the information of the company and networking people together that way.
Basically, employees of X company all get linked together and from it, like companies have greater access to each other. For B2B networking, there is little better. It also provides RSS uploads to a company’s profile allowing for blog feeds, but the ability to advertise by pages or groups does not exist as in Facebook.
Taking Advantage of Socialising Demands Effort
Initially, the obvious advantage of publishing your company’s message via social media is the sheer volume of people using these networks on a regular basis. Christophe Langlois, founder of Visible-Banking, a company consulting to financial services on Social Media said about business and social media, "Any presence is better than none."
It’s true to a certain extent but the real benefits of social media take more effort than simple presence. In spite of the relationships being virtual, the relationships are also genuinely human and therefore, if productive, demand effort. Friends, family, marriages, colleagues, clients and suppliers are all examples of the real relationships that people experience in daily life and can enhance through social media. And an active involvement in relationships make them more effective and mutually beneficially.
So for businesses to gain a more productive presence via social media:
- Build social media communication strategies into your business model. To see benefits of using social media for networking and communicating, it is essential to set an objective for using said media followed by a plan.
- Find the media that best communicates your company message. Some sites may aid your communication. Because Facebook has more people does not mean that a page on the site will increase interest in your company.
- Great content is much more productive than spamming. Relationships are not built on irrelevant and unconnected phrases loosely put together. Conversation is a two way stream; spamming is like being shouted at.
- Get to know your competitors. Find out if any competitors are using social media and learn from their achievements. If not, you already have an advantage.
- Persistence, commitment and continuity build relationships. Trust takes time to develop but having clients’ recommendations is well worth the effort.
- Keep refining your message. Markets change and so your communication needs to. Understanding your market and knowing how to enhance your content is essential.
Social Media is popular precisely because it brings people together and makes them feel a part of a larger network. And because it’s free, the only cost to businesses in developing relationships, building trust and promoting the company is time and dedication.
Building a Platform for Better Communication
Anyone who has been able to resist the pull of Mafia Wars, Frontier Ville, etc. on Facebook and has actually connected and reconnected with acquaintances, initiated dialogue and perhaps met new people along the way have seen the power of social media as an efficient communicating tool. Twitter, Myspace and the rest are all designed to get people talking.
Being such a great tool for marketing, most businesses if not all within the next 10 years will have a Facebook page, a website, Twitter account and whatever other forms of social technology are created in that time. And as the internet creates more competition, especially in the service sector, as Charlene Li says “It's not about selling something anymore; that might be the end result, but to get there, you need to work on the relationship.”
Anthony Rimmer - Anthony has a lot of life experience, working in a variety of jobs, in many countries around the world. He has lived in South Korea, South ...
