Social media and its advantages

Why would you blog? I post blog , because I want to communicate my views to millions of people with just one click. I feel empowered. Bloggers are my friends and will tell me truth, unlike advertisement. There are more reasons to register in social network site: like connect with existing friends, make new friends, share photos, share videos etc.

Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. These sites typically use technologies such as blog, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs to allow users to interact. It’s hard to find a better way to understand your consumer, learn how they use your product & services and move them to purchase more quickly. Still lots of brands are holding back from creating a social media presence.

Social networking sites like face book, Myspace, Linkedin are effective channels to find out new readers but it will work only if one chooses right strategy. To avoid the scatter approach, it is always better to choose one or two networking sites, which are closer to your business model.

What can be done with Social media?

Communicate: Blogs, podcast, Video blogging, Video sharing, Photo sharing
Connect: Social Network, Mobile text messaging, Instant messaging, Skype
Converse: Blog comments/ Responses, Meme Trackers
Categorize: Tagging, Social bookmarking, Search Engines
Customize: RSS, Widgets, Virtual words/Avatars
Collaborate: Wikis, consumer generated media, open source software, creative commons, mash-up

Collect- collective Wisdom: Rating Sites, Wikipedia, Social News

Communize: Created all the above, Build through conversations

How can these tools lead to change?

• Building awareness, spreading the words
• Involving those affected by the problem in creating the solution
• Providing social support and motivation
• Helping people take action
• Customizing message

To get the full advantage of social marketing impact keep the following things in mind:

Get ready with the basic information like name, email, URL, screen name if any, give description of each field:

Focus only on one networking site to start with, Let us start with face book:

Create a business page: - Design your brand persona so it drives value. Choose the right category www.facebook/business follow face book guidelines. Populate your page. Once your page gets populated add application to your page.

Top applications pick:

You tube: http://apps.facebook.com/videobox (you can play your You Tube video on your face book page)

Flickr : http://apps.facebook.com/myflickr (you can display your photo with this application)

For upcoming events: http://apps.facebook.com/upcoming (add all your upcoming events)

RSS: http://apps.facebook.com/simplyrss/ (you can have RSS feeds from site to your face book page)

After creating an a/c on face book it’s time to promote your social networking presence. Use all free face book promotional tools. Guidelines can be seen from the following link

http://www.facebook.com/pages/manage/promo_guidelines.php

You have to keep the interest alive in your pages so that visitor will come back to your page again and again. Give community members a reason to meet, communicate and share. Provide relevant content that has value in the community. After getting healthy presence on one website try to move to another site/community and replicate the same model.

Optimization of Social Media Community:

Book mark your community with social bookmarking sites like Digg, Myspace, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Furl, Technorati etc. After bookmarking the community its time to move forward to add tags, and submit post to other social bookmarking sites. One can also do the emailing of community.