Social Media is about relationships.
For a business, using social media means building deeper and more trusting relationships with customer.
All social media is not created equal nor for the same purpose. Users use Social Sharing sites to seed articles they feel are important to the rest of the community; digg.com, reddit.com, newvine.com and also social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and stumbleupon.com fall in this category.
Social Publishing sites are used to upload User Generated Content (UGC) by users to display their photos, video, knowledge and more. Examples are Flickr, youTube, microblogging site Twitter, Wikipedia and also all blogs.
Social Networking sites are normally what we think of when we hear about Social Media. MySpace and Facebook are the big social networking sites. MySpace are more directed to the artist and musician while Facebook are built as a life style social network. In addition to the big Social Networks, there are many more smaller social networks. Ning, a site that provides tools for building, manageing and hosting social networks hosts over 500,000 social networks – a new social network is being built every 30 seconds.
Building relationships with customers takes time, effort and money.
A business needs to ask what the return on invesment is for a social media marketing campaign. This is a tough question that has been answered a few different ways.
We will try, in a later post, to address the Social Media ROI.
Comments is a fundamental part of social media, so do your social duty and add a comment with your thoughts.
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