E-Business Time!

We continue with more about Social Media: a powerful strategic tool for an Internet marketing campaign.

Social media interactive communities designed to generate and disseminate content through social interaction, can greatly increase quality traffic to a company’s website, which is what an Internet marketing campaign is all about. Having a website or blog presence is your first step for this purpose. Next you need to be familiar with the methods of spreading the word through the special channels: social bookmarking sites, content sharing sites, social recommendation sites, photo and video sharing sites, etc.

Every day, millions of people use social media channels to create, discover and share ideas with others. They find great value in the connections they make with businesses. There are different methods for generating publicity through social media channels and online communities’ websites. You may add links to special services or work on your brand promotion via the fans or followers audiences, gather numerous readers around your business subject, provide professional advice via “Questions and Answers” options and so on.

According to Lloyd Salmons, the first chairman of the Internet Advertising Bureau Social Media Council, “Social media isn’t just about big networks like Facebook and MySpace, it’s about brands having conversations“.

Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures, video, rating and bookmarking sites. Many of the social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms.

Popular social media sites include but are not limited to:

• Social networks
• Blogging systems
• Micro-blogging services
• Social bookmarking sites
• Wikis
• Social news sites
• Event sharing sites
• Media sharing sites.

Other types of social media sites are virtual worlds, community questions and answers, media & entertainment platforms, game sharing sites and more.

When looking through this list you may ask a question: how many social media channels am I supposed to use for my company? Actually it’s a matter of your individual business activity and there is no simple answer to this question.

For example, big brands may be engaged in more than ten channels. However such activity and wide presence through the many and varied social media channels requires significant human and time resources. As you can see it is more a matter of the resources that you have available. So we can only give you a general description of each social media channel and provide general recommendations and schemes which should be customized to your resources and clientele.

Social networks

Social networks focus on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as email and instant messaging services.

Great examples of social networks are: Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Tagged, Orkut, Friendster, Xanga, Multiply, etc.  

Facebook is a widely used worldwide system to meet people from many societies and countries. Millions of people use Facebook everyday to keep up with their friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet. Currently Facebook has over 400 mln active users and the figure is constantly growing.

MySpace, an entertaining networking site, and LinkedIn, a popular professional network created to help you meet professionals, are also among the top players of this field.

Blogging systems

You may already be familiar with blogging systems due to your online practice. Blogs are widely popular nowadays and each big company normally starts its own blog. Blogging systems as well as blog search engines can help you connect your brand with the influential bloggers and consumers who are creating and participating in the blogosphere.

WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, ActiveRain are great examples of blogging systems where you can start a blog, express yourself, and search the blogs you want to read regularly.

Micro-blogging services

Micro-blogging services allow subscribers to share real-time short news updates and other posts reaching the audience in seconds. This form of multimedia blogging allows users to send brief text updates or macromedia such as photos or audio clips and publish them. Text updates or other posts may be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user.

Twitter  is a stand alone micro-blogging point which has gained huge popularity. Many top branding companies share news about a company’s products and services, or provide customer service using it.

Other micro-blogging platforms are Plurk, Tumblr and Jaiku where users can post text, images, video, links, quotes, and audio.

Social bookmarking sites

Social bookmarking sites are perfect vehicles to store all your bookmarks online and learn about cool websites from the public bookmark space. You’ll be able to share sites you want others to read, promote, and organize the web the way you want. Below you can see the front page of Delicious, one of the most popular social bookmarking sites.

Wikis

Wikis are special websites for collaborative work online. This social media channel allows users to create and edit web pages with topics of their own. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites, to power community websites, for personal note taking, in corporate intranets, and in knowledge management systems.

Generally they serve a specific purpose, and off topic or disputed material is promptly removed by the user community. Such is the case of the collaborative free encyclopedia Wikipedia. Another example called PBworks (formerly PBwiki) is a commercial collaboration service for the project management and other business purposes.

Social news and recommendation sites

We should also mention social news sites (Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, Spinn, StumbleUpon) that can turn to be a great source of visitor traffic if you have something newsworthy to share.

Here people discover and share content from anywhere on the web. Generally social news websites were made for people to discover and share content by submitting links and stories, voting and commenting. Using the features of voting stories up and down people can help the stories appear on the front page.

When you use this social media tool it is important that you succeed in being more interesting than many of the other stories that are submitted every day, as only the most heavily voted (popular) stories remain on the front page for more than a few minutes or seconds.

Event sharing sites

The purpose of the social event sharing sites is to help users with their plans. That’s why they offer an event calendar and a social networking site features. Users may have relationships with each other and receive notifications about what their friends are planning. Reminders via email or SMS for the particular event are also offered by the event sharing sites.

Good examples of the social event sharing sites are Upcoming, Meetup, Eventful, Zvents, and Socializr. Facebook also provides an event system very much like a simplified version of Upcoming, although it is more typically used for informal or private get-togethers.

Media sharing sites

Photo and video sharing sites like YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, Vimeo, Blinkx are valuable for their users as places where they upload and share numerous resources, photos, offers, advertising information, etc. Here you may find a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos. 

Here is a brief review of the most prominent social media channels that you are advised to use for the SMM campaign. The list is not comprehensive and may vary due to the fans/follower subculture of your particular industry plus your public connections demands.

Examples of social media channels to exploit on the Web

Twitter.com Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Since its creation Twitter has gained notability and popularity worldwide. It’s a perfect way to reach thousands of readers with product innovations, public opinion polls and feed-back for your service.
Facebook is the most popular social networking site that can help you connect and communicate with your customers and business contacts, partners and future prospects. Create groups related to your business, post business updates on your wall, upload media, schedule company events and invite those who can be potentially interested.
LinkedIn is mainly a business-oriented social networking site. The feature called LinkedIn Answers which is similar to Google Answers or Yahoo! Answers, allows users to ask questions for the community to answer. Mainly used for professional networking, LinkedIn allows registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people they know and trust in business.
Digg.com. Digg is a user-driven news sharing site where members can vote, bury, and comment on stories submitted by other members. Getting onto Digg’s front page often results in thousands of visitors coming to your site and it can have lasting ranking effects.
Newsvine.com. This is another social news site where members can submit news stories, comment on other popular stories, or create connections with regular users. Your Newsvine user name becomes your own subdomain, so be sure to use keywords in your profile.
Delicious Del.icio.us is a Yahoo-owned social bookmarking site. Del.icio.us allows members to publicly save bookmarks using tags. Don’t be afraid to tag your own content: create a public bookmark in there and use your keywords or keyword phrases when you assign tags.
YouTube.com. YouTube is a popular video-sharing service owned by Google. Uploading a compelling video could bring you additional traffic from both YouTube.com and the Google search engine, because Google could soon index your video.

Be aware however that just posting or sharing your content on such sites and leaving it alone is not enough to conduct a successful SMM campaign. Social media channels are all about sharing and discovery, there’s a conversation that happens around the content. What you need is to submit and promote advices, tools, articles, etc., for the communities to discuss the topics that they’re passionate about.

In our next lesson you’ll find out how to develop a specific strategy and apply a mix of tactics via different social media marketing tools.

What you should remember from this lesson:

1. Do not underestimate the power of Social Media Marketing, and take a closer look at the various social media channels that can be an effective source of visitor traffic to your site.
2. Most popular social media channels include social networks, blogs and micro-blogs, social bookmarks and wikis, social news sites and event sharing sites, media sharing sites and others.
3. Be active when participating in the social media channels that you were once involved in, and track the feedback that your activities result in. There is nothing worse than a business profile outdated, comments and answers unattended, or a blog abandoned by its owner.