What is Social Media?

Social media is an online environment that connects individuals and encourages interaction. Common social media sites include Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. These sites allow users to create networks of people who are able to experience each other’s content, images, videos, audio, and more.

Social media marketing refers to internet marketing aimed at accomplishing goals through active participation in various forms of social media.

How to Make Social Media Work

Once considered just a fad, social media is clearly here to stay – and its numbers are growing every day. Today’s social media participants are internet savvy and not easily swayed by a cookie cutter approach. In order to make the platform work to their advantage, companies must take their social media marketing seriously.

Offer Assistance

One strategy successful companies use is to limit self-promotion, which can quickly turn users off. Instead, generate content that is helpful to potential customers: offer advice, link to helpful articles, provide information, and report industry news. Customers will be more responsive to this approach than superficial publicity.

Strategise

Diving head-first into social media without a solid plan or goals in place is the best way to crash and burn in the platform. Users know what they’re doing and aren’t likely to be fooled by generic advertising and hapless attempts to connect. Companies should start slowly, creating profiles on one or two sites, and taking plenty of time to learn the ins and outs of the network.

Contribute Good Content

Creating quality content is one of the best ways to set a social profile above the crowd. Recent studies have shown that internet users are reading more than ever, but few sources are actually generating original content. This can present many opportunities to reach a wider following.

Focus on Connections

The rules that apply to making (and keeping) friends in the real world also apply to social media: be honest, sincere, and polite. Reach out to niche markets and present a genuine perspective.

Blogging Works

The numbers don’t lie – blogging is on the rise, with some industry trackers reporting the number of legitimate blogs currently climbing into the hundreds of millions. Linking a social profile to a blog is a great way to update content and give followers something to look forward to.

Learn to Love Links

Linking to other blogs, sites, and profiles makes it easier for search engines and users to find information. Frequently linking to other sources also increases awareness among other social media marketers, encouraging them to reciprocate the link.

Find a Niche

Niche marketing appeals to a specific industry sector. There are many so-called micro communities dedicated to these small, specialised markets: education.com, travbuddy.com, care2.com, and more. Creating a presence in these niche networks allows companies to fill the role of ‘big fish in a small pond’. It is much easier to make an impression and have a voice in these small communities than to post to larger groups and risk getting lost in the shuffle.

Get Started

Twitter and Facebook are the current reigning social media sites, but there are plenty more out there for companies looking to embark on a social media marketing campaign. Some of the most popular (in no particular order) include:

YouTube

Del.icio.us

StumbleUpon

Digg

LinkedIn

Flickr

Reddit

Secondlife

Technorati

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