Social Media for Business

Social Media is a relatively new term that has already become part of the established language of the Internet.

There are many self proclaimed marketing guru’s who are hailing Social Media as the next big business opportunity.

Are they right?

What is Social Media?

According to Wikapedia,

“Social media is content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal and business.”

What’s important about Social Media is not what it is but what it creates.

It creates communities of people with similar interests who are interacting with each other about those interests. If those interests happen to overlap with your products or services then you can view these communities as potential markets.

So why is Social Media seen as so important for business?

It’s these ready made markets that are the attraction of Social Media to many businesses. They have recognised that ready made markets have been created for them and all they have to do is become accepted within the community in order to promote their business.

Obviously it isn’t as easy as just joining a community and then selling for all you are worth. The sales tactics are completely different as many communities are resistant to obviously commercially motivated agendas from its members. However softer sales tactics can generate significant results.

What’s more some of these communities are huge. For example, even back in 2008 Myspace had so many members that had it been a country it would have been the 8th largest country in the World!

Will Social Media Work for My Business?

That really depends upon whether you can find communities that match what you are selling.

At the risk of generalising, Social Media tends to attract younger audiences. Certainly products aimed at teenagers sell well as do products for 20 and 30 somethings.

It’s a case of researching the communities that these services offer and testing if there is a match with your product.

The more well known Social Media services are Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

Twitter for Business

One final point about Twitter. It has recently gained significantly in popularity due to some very clever PR using breaking news stories that were made “global” through Twitter. On our blog we recently looked specifically at Twitter to see the benefits to business. You'll find these two interesting articles below:

Should I use Twitter for Business

Are you listening to Twitter