Getting Your Head Around Social Media

Welcome to our first Marketing Monday for August! As August is a 5 Monday month, I’m starting a week later this month. This month I’m going to talk about social media – a phenonomen that has in recent times exploded on the web. If you’re not using social media to promote your business, you need to get going fast.

Social media is, in its most basic form, a shift in the way people share and discover news or informational content. It makes it easy for people to interact with the information they are receiving, instead of simply reading it. Social media allows people to instantly connect and interact with people all around the world.

Social media enables you to:

• Gain a presence online
• Improve your website traffic
• Establish credibility and the ‘trust factor’ for you and your business
• Connect personally with your audience
• Glean valuable information to help you grow and change your business
• Enhance your likability and online personality, an important buying trigger

Whether you’re just starting out, or a larger business,  the addition of social networking is an imperative step to your marketing strategy.

Examples of such social media platforms are social networks like Twitter and Facebook, blogs, podcasts, and wikis. They share many, if not all of the following attributes:

• Participation – encouraging others to comment or contribute to any given conversation or topic.

• * Conversation – social media is seen as an open conversation instead of a broadcast you may see from more traditional media.

• Connectedness – using links to other people, sites and resources.

• Community – sharing common interests such as business ventures, politics, hobbies and pastimes etc.

• Openness – open to feedback and participation, encouragement of  comments, and sharing of information.

We are all human with a need to build contacts, share ideas, and create friends and inspiration. Having communities at our fingertips with the support we need, or colleagues available instantly to hear a new  idea or strategy makes today’s business and personal lifestyle easier in a sense.  Time zone issues can be eliminated,  and long distance bills potentially a thing of the past in most cases, whether for business or personal reasons.

This simple addition to the way your business is currently functioning can bring you clients from areas you never would have thought to look, and all with the ease of what social media has to offer you.

Tune in next week, where we will compare some of the top social networking sites.